What is a useful way to approach phone agents to garner better success when calling to create silly/illogical but awesome value itineraries using Excursionist? Also if the outbound flight is in business/first, usually the excursionist leg will be in business/first even if the return leg is in economy. But if only the final leg of the outbound flight is in economy, then the website will automatically make the excursionist in economy and charge for business/first. Will phone agents work around this?
IE: Flying from Haneda (HND) to Papeete (PPT) via Beijing (PEK) and then Auckland (AKL). Direct flight from Narita (NRT) to AKL opened but no option online to marry with AKL to PPT (AKL-PPT only avail in Y). Took a few agents over the phone, but one finally made it work.
Now want to use Excursionist for a future trip in Africa out of Joburg by adding on a qualifying return leg as Osaka to Tokyo. So NRT-AKL-PPT//JNB-anywhere in Africa//OSA-TYO.
Usually this isn't a problem to do on the website, but when you add a leg, you also need to search the first leg again (NRT-AKL-PPT), followed by second leg (JNB-???), followed by return leg (OSA-TYO). But since my first leg isn't searchable online, the website will error out with availability and I'm assuming the only workaround is via phone.
But the problem I'm getting is (1) Agent cannot find space due to the same error found on website. (2) If an agent can work past (1), will not price excursionist correctly since initial logic doesn't see how excursionist applies on a convoluted routing.
Looking back, It would have probably been much easier if I did the excursionist routing before I changed HND-PEK-AKL-PPT to NRT-AKL-PPT rather than the other way around.