Regarding the ticket issuance, the airline will prioritize based on the departure date, since yours in months away there's probably others more urgent so they will process those first and get to yours in due time.
But yes, it's somewhat of a manual process and if you want yours ticketed really fast for whatever reason you can probably ask the agent to bump yours up and probably won't be an issue as you saw.
Regarding fuel surcharges, yes it's charged based on month of booking, but I assume if you reserved it in Sept and it got delayed 4 weeks and booked in Oct and the fuel surcharge was higher, you can probably argue it back down to the Sept charge without much issue, though hassle. On the other hand, maybe it'll go down!
And the fuel surcharge is not whatever CX deems, it's whatever the Civil Aviation Dept approves, which can be
found here.
Originally Posted by
midlevels
Since the reward ticket is for a few months out, does it mean that I have to wait months for ticket issuance?
Luckily in this case a visa is not required for travel, otherwise what would I have done if I needed to show an eticket for a visa application? Most consular officers probably wouldn't put much faith in a statement that "the airline has promised to issue the ticket when they have some free time to do so".
Also, doesn't this give Cathay free license to charge whatever fuel surcharge they want? If I give the instruction to issue the ticket in August, but they don't issue the ticket for a few weeks, will I have to pay the September or October surcharge? What if it's higher? It doesn't make sense that they should be allowed to give an approximate tax/fuel amount and then charge whatever they want later.