Originally Posted by Guy Betsy

I echo peasant's post.

You don't understand what 'married' segments mean or do.

If you have an existing HKG-LAX booking, and you check seperately that there are seats on SGN or TPE to HKG and then you go to your booking and try to add that segment in, and find out that 1) the seat you thought had seats now suddenly show ZERO availability, and that 2) if the agents say that the seats are there but when they try to do the booking, the segment comes back 'UN' which means Unable to Confirm.

This is where Point of Sale comes in. The revenue from SGN / TPE to LAX is less than HKG-LAX so the priority goes to strictly HKG-LAX flights. Hence you saw the availability. If you try to get the seats from SGN or TPE, then the point of sale will be those cities and CX will give you seats only there are seats to be sold all the way through from SGN or TPE.. or for that matter, all other cities within Asia connecting to LAX. So its not just SGN or TPE you're fighting for seats but rest of asia, ie from BKK, SIN. ex-SIN has higher yields for CX so ex-SIN to LAX on the same flight as yours will show availability.

You cannot merge one reservation to another.. and it is very problematic for an agent to take over a CX made reservation. It is possible but problematic and even so, the whole thing will still go down to where the ticket is being issued and the point of sale issue comes up. If you cancel the HKG-LAX, you will see that your SGN/TPE-HKG miraculously apprear available. But then your HKG-LAX would have disappeared.

In the days of paper tickets, yes you can book one reservation on one PNR and another somewhere else. But with e-tickets, everything has got to be contained in ONE PNR otherwise the ticket won't print.