Originally Posted by
Wanderlust888
Thank you
On iberia.com I clicked ‘pay’, they detected a "possible improper use of my payment card"*, and gave me the options of "cancel booking" , "retry payment", or "visit our offices" (!).
I guess at that point they held the ticket for me to decide what to do, and as I didn't click on "cancel booking", they didn't release it immediately.
(Of course, my payment card worked perfectly on ba.com - it hadn't been the credit card company blocking it but iberia.com being over-cautious perhaps because of my IP address being abroad)
It is just Iberia. I tried to book a reward flight through their site and got the "possible improper use" on all of the 6 cards (both credit and debit) I tried. It told me to call them instead, but they refused to waive the booking fee as it was not an error on their website. They then tried to charge me double the amount quoted, but thats another story.
Following the IB promotion I found a J flight to SFO straight away (on IB), which I was considering. I got to the final booking page and chickened out, as I was not sure about the date. A few minutes later I decided to just do it, as the change/cancel fee on IB is just 25 Euro. Had the same experience as you, the flight was gone for around 1,5 hour and then reappeared.