Thanks for the kind words. I am surprised by what you say about the routing - it is clearly allowed. One problem Mrs Sobhi may have is that she has to pass the routing back to the ticketing desk in London for clearance - if she gets an ignorant person there she may have had some difficulty persuading them.

As ExMo says, there should be no problem with the reroute.

I do find that dealing with Mrs Sobhi by fax on complex issues like o/x is better than by phone, and I have had no problem explaining to her that way why I needed o's and x's the way I did in Europe.