[Kudos] Partner Award Booking
Hello fellow FT'lers,
I'd like to share a little report concerning award booking and service on EK.
Ms. c_d had travel plans for Europe in December 2010 and took over all my available DL SkyMiles. Depsite the fact that a low award in J/I is only 100k, DL is doing a pretty good job of blocking the domestic feeder flights, while the TATL segments actually have wide open availability in award classes. And of course that happened ... wide availability on on four domestic segments and two TATL; however no availability on a 1:25h connecting flight. After trying to reason with DL it became clear that they won't move a bit.
One night I remembered that I still have a couple of EK miles available and also recalled their partners, namely CO and UA. I decided to give it a try and try to move the feeder flights on an EK award ticket operated by CO or UA. I am a lowly Blue with EK, so I had little hope in that actually working.
When I called the Manchester Service Center the first thing I was really suprised about was the fact, that CSR are available that actually speak my language. I quickly described the situation and the agent tried to locate flights. Obviously it's pretty challenging to align the DL TATL portion with feeder flights from other airlines and the agent needed quite some time to tackle that issue.
For the next day, I received a couple of calls from the agent, double checking the departure times and suggestion alternate routings, etc. to me. It took some time but finally Ms. c_d got a confirmed set of tickets meeting her needs. ^
In summary, I was absolutely overwhelmed on how EK is treating a super-low Blue member. It's making me sad and angry to compare the service level of EK (in-flight and ground) to the level received by my usual airline.