Originally Posted by
safari ari
You can find AY awards to skirt around the BA surcharge, as well as CX/KE/DE through HKG/ICN/FRA. Nonetheless, if your technical integration team cannot get one system to talk to another to get award bookings in a timely manner then they should be fired and never employed again. I believe this is more negotiations as SQ is one of the harder partner airlines to get award space on, and AS probably decided to let people get credit flying them and figure out all the details later.
I would guess it isn’t the technical skills of the “technical integration team” members that is stopping/delaying the integrations. Rather it simply isn’t a high priority for AS, so they focus their resources on other projects or don’t have enough technical resources. They get the marketing benefit of announcing partners, the revenue from selling miles to partners, and none of the cost coming with integrations and/or additional redemptions.