Hi all,

First time poster, long time lurker, and finally ended up in a situation where I can't seem to solve it on my own. I tried the AC reservations desk first, but after being put on hold for 15 minutes to be told "You only get status miles when you fly AC metal", I gave up. Unless these last couple of years have been extremely lucky for me, or something's changed, I know that's false for a fact. I've always gotten status miles for any *A flight I took, including domestic flights in China, Europe, etc.

Anyways, my actual problem is that I need to make a trip to BLR soon from YUL, and as I'm sure you know, AC and India don't really go well together anymore since they stopped direct flights. AC's offerings all take me through Frankfurt first and then on LH, but that's a bit sub-optimal for me since I'll be flying Business/First and would rather have a long-haul on a 777 rather than 2 flights with a layover in Europe. I've looked around and CO has a EWR-DEL flight with a connection on Kingfisher Airlines from DEL-BLR. I've looked/read around and it seems like the CO82 flight is pretty nice, and since CO is now *A, it would give me access to the lounges and status miles.

Problem is, AC says they can't route that for me, CO will route EWR-DEL and EWR-DEL-BLR (but only if I pick economy, which is strange since I don't mind doing DEL-BLR on economy), but not YUL-EWR-DEL-BLR (they insist on FRA too). The only place where I can get the routing I want is Expedia, which gives me YUL-EWR-DEL-BLR through CO/Kingfisher, on business (except YUL-EWR and DEL-BLR). However I have a feeling that if I go with Expedia, I'll end up getting separate tickets, which are always problematic since you're not registered as an official "connection" pax which can wreak all sorts of havoc.

So here are my questions:

1) Am I being thick and should I just go through FRA? I really am thinking a long-haul is better (with 2 small connections) on a 777 as business.

2) Is there any way I can get CO to actually price me the whole route I want, or is there some reason I'm not understanding as to why they won't let me do it?

Thanks for any advice!

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Best regards,
Alex Ionescu