Originally Posted by
guv1976
The problem of "booking" a flight and not ending up with a ticket is not peculiar to IB; it's been reported on different airlines in different FT forums. Often, it involves using miles from one FFP to book travel on a partner carrier.
There has also been an issue -- recently resolved -- of booking AA award flights with IB Plus Avios.
Maybe I should have titled this thread "When is a 'booking confirmation' not a booking confirmation?" Lol. The logic Iberia is trying to apply here just doesn't pass the sniff test, at least for any typical consumer.
Last night, I did see the other thread you mentioned about people not being able to book AA flights through Iberia's website for a while, and noted that the timing of when those problems started appearing is right around the time they cancelled my reservation (May 17th). It makes me wonder if that's the reason this happened. But if that is the reason, I think that would put even more responsibility on Iberia to fix the problem - that would mean that this was a systemic problem they must have been aware of, not just one agent's accidental slip-up that could have gone unnoticed.
After all of this came to light last night, I tried calling AA to see if they could offer any help. I told them I knew it wasn't their responsibility, but since it involved a reservation on flights they were operating, I thought maybe they could at least give me some additional information. I was very lucky to get an experienced and extremely helpful AA agent. She spent about 30 minutes trying to find a solution, but could not. She did confirm that the reservation was made in April, and that Iberia cancelled it on May 17th, but that was about all she could see. I asked her what AA's policy would be if the situation were reversed - i.e., if I had used my Aadvantage miles to make a confirmed booking on a flight operated by Iberia and then the reservation dropped because AA failed to ticket it. She said that AA has a "liaison officer" for each of their One World partners, and that in a situation like this, their liaison would have called Iberia to either have the booking reinstated (and ticketed) or they would have found a way to accommodate my wife and son on another set of flights. So while other airlines might occasionally "drop the ball" in converting a confirmed booking to a ticket number, it appears at least some of them have mechanisms to fix these problems when they occur. Apparently Iberia doesn't do this, but they really should. It's just part of good corporate policy to "own" your screw-ups and not have the consequences spill onto your customers.
Iberia's treatment of us is already having financial consequences for them (apart from anyone reading this thread being turned off). One of my graduate students is going to a conference in Barcelona next month, and I have instructed him not to have anything to do with Iberia for his travel arrangements.