Originally Posted by dvs7310

This is something that in a lot of years of heavy flying I've never encountered before. I have a ticket booked in "I" class. I booked it through Expedia (very disappointingly at this point), so have had to try dealing with them to change it.

The flight I want has been fluctuating between I2 to I4 during the past week on Expertflyer. This also exactly matches what Expedia (US site) and JL itself has available on the flight for "I" class.

After a few unsuccessful calls to Expedia, they insist every time the flight has 0 availability in "I", only "D" and "C" which requires a significant fare difference. Finally the last CS rep I spoke to there said that maybe there is inventory for sale but not for changes. I have always thought that inventory is just inventory, not locked to a certain ticket status, and that's been exactly my experience in the past, plenty of times I've changed even on JL when inventory showed "I1" and no problem.

Finally I got ahold of JL reservations directly, and low and behold they agree with Expedia that there's no "I" inventory on the flight. She couldn't explain why it's for sale and not allowing the change on my ticket, so pushed the issue to the rate desk who also came back and said I'd have to pay the difference to "D" to move to that flight.

Is this normal on JL? On days of high demand, do they actually hold some inventory for sale only and lock out people changing existing tickets for the same fare class? I'm not asking them to open availability, it's clearly there, so I'm pretty surprised by this. I can get a flight from NRT (instead of HND) some 18 hours later but it gets into BKK at a horrendous hour, so was really the last choice. (It's not an issue of HND vs NRT on the original ticket, they are co-terminals for JL tickets, but in any case my ticket actually was ticketed for HND-BKK).