Originally Posted by travelgirl2_99

We have an upcoming international trip on Aeroplan tickets that were booked using my points. I have no status but my husband is SE. How do we get his FF# added to his ticket ? The agent is saying it can't be done and that it "isn't necessary anyway because you are in business class", but I'd like to have his FF# added for meal priority, in case there are flight delays so that the concierge will take care of rebooking to other connecting flights, etc.

Originally Posted by gcashin

I find a lot of the issues with benefits on AE reward flights seem to be rooted in system issues, and the agents may not know the policies well enough to know when to override the system.

Aeroplan redemptions seem to be inconsistent when it comes to things like recognizing free checked baggage, as well as access to preferred seats, even if the status does show up properly on the boarding pass. In order to provide those benefits, it often forces the agent to override things like bag fees or preferred seating fees.

While agent knowledge of policies and benefits seems to be an issue, agents are often trained that the system is correct and they should follow what it says (i.e. if the system says no free bags, there are no free bags). Fixing the underlying IT issues would help save AC so much time in dealing with these issues and trying to resolve things like refund requests, etc for fees that never should have been charged in the first place.

Originally Posted by Ben Lipsey

It's because when you redeem your FFP is stored in the FQTR field, not the FQTV field. The problem is twofold: FQTR is populated by the account whence the miles came (i.e. redeemer's, not necessarily traveller's, account), whereas the system is set to recognise status from the FQTV field. On award tickets, we don't populate the FQTV field because there are instances where the FFP is picked up irrespective of fare class (e.g. IRROPS rebooking), along with some other backend issues.

We instruct our agents to verify eligibility for status benefits when on reward tickets precisely because the system doesn't pick it up automatically. As long as you have your status card you shouldn't have any issues; the larger issue I'm hearing is that some are saying their status benefits are being denied when on award tickets, and this is something I will impress upon our Airports teams to rectify.

UPDATE: I'm told we have plans in place to fix this process. Can't share any timelines yet, I'm afraid.