Scored award seats on SQ -- what to watch for?
I got two one-way business class award seats SEA-BKK via SIN, on SQ, in late April 2023.
On AS's website, the trip shows as expected when I manage the booking.
On SQ's website, I am able to manage the booking and select seats, using the SQ booking ref Alaska provides. I see receipts with AS ticket numbers there also. (The ticket numbers are wildly non-sequential, which I found mildly interesting.)
Is there anything else to watch for, in terms of getting an unpleasant surprise when we actually go to fly this trip? I'm experienced with airline travel in general, but what's got me a little spooked with this particular reservation is that I booked them myself on AS's web site at the very moment I was on the phone with an AS agent telling me that there was no inventory available to book for those flights -- even a paid ticket, let alone award tickets. (I was on the phone with AS because after stumbling on these available seats, I originally wanted a more complicated award booking that would have required an agent to complete.)
The agent thought the seats were being offered to me in error, or that someone else had snagged them out from under me and the website was lagging. She was confused about why I was offered -- and could actually complete -- a booking that she said she would not have been able to complete herself. I was staring at the offer in my browser and had never added it to my cart, for example, so it's not like I myself had inadvertently taken the available seats out of inventory.
Another 'interesting' aspect of this trip: after booking it, I was able to use AS's website to change just the SIN-BKK segment to one that is more convenient than the only one I was originally offered (and which I booked). That seemed to work, but then I noticed that the SIN-BKK segment had actually been dropped completely! Fortunately a call to AS got it reinstated, but it was a tense 25 minutes.
(I bought one-way tix in biz on JL to return to SEA, as I was unable to find suitable award tickets on JL, SQ, or KE.)
Last edited by tai4de2; Sep 12, 2022 at 7:16 pm