Some posters mentioned they email their sales office to issue an award reservation or a ticket.
If you do this, just be aware that:
a.) Your sales office might not have a person with the authority to create a partner award reservation (they refered me back to the call center).
---> if your local sales office is good at this via email: great! Lucky you. ^
If they tell you "no availability": don't believe them.
If they tell you they can't do it: you are not alone...
b.) if you pay by emailing them forms, (they told me we'll do it this way to do me a favor and save me a second trip there since their system had been down last Friday when I wanted to pay and have the ticket issued):
they'll ask you to email a form with your credit card number, the full billing address AND a copy of the card AND a copy of your ID by email.
If you like the idea of sending this kind of data unencrypted...
also filling the form out and copying all this would take me about 40 minutes, and I would still not know if they did it properly
----> if the sales office ist just a trip of less than 40 minutes for you, I would absolutely prefer going there in person.
c.) After booking several awards, I realized that 2 out of 3 agents simply can't or don't know how to process an award correctly, to a point you can't work with them on the phone, or they'll hand it over to a coworker when you visit the sales office. The third one will be able to do what you want, BUT often makes mistakes that can be helped by politely coaching him/her "no availability..." "hmmm, that's strange, there should be flight nr. abc on airline XX as a staralliance partner award, could you please look again?" or quoting you the wrong amount of miles. Only 1 out of 8 will do it perfectly. My point is: I'd rather have to call three times and be at the office in person to make sure they get it done while the seats are available and that they charge the right amount....
Most phone agents and ALL of the agents in my sales office are really nice people who are always very friendly to me, they are patient if it takes longer, and they try everything they can do help. All I am saying here is that it might be much work or even a lot of hard work to get a TK award issued when it's not on TK flights. For some routes, it's worth it.
