I have a question for you though. I have been wanting to do a 'multicarrier award ticket' redemption, 4 segments in total. Each individual segment is showing as 'available' in the elevated + unelevated search engine. But when I contacted the call centre to book, they say that all the flights I have requested are not available for redemption.
The reason why I wanted to use the call centre to book is to save on the miles. The multicarrier award cost 165k miles, vs booking each flight per segment will cost more than that.
I have request the agent to repeatedly check and they said their amadeus system is real time.
Is this a normal experience? Or this is just a crappy bug that CX hasnt fixed?
1, Pre-pandemic, call centre is usually has the best availability.
2. Recently I found myself correcting agents or insisting they trying they initially said not possible. This is in case of refund situations, so in case of booking situations, the solution is to HUACA (as difficult as it is to perform these days)
3. But if multiple agents (in different shifts) say no then this may be still be a genuine system limitation.
If I haven't had so many miles pre-pandemic I wouldn't be going into miles to multi-carrier redemption.
Essentially all my future travel are still optimistic and are just simple returns with a stopover if necessary.
The most-likely use case for my Asia Miles is still fare offset at HK$0.058/AM. If you've less pre-pandemic miles than me, you get to be a bit more picky I guess.