Originally Posted by jiburi;34820209...
Nonsense or not, I don't think it's realistic to expect full transparency on availability as every airlines have different computer system, IT, and network synergies, etc. I think every airlines will try their best to accommodating your booking but if it doesn't automatically confirm your booking, the best we can hope for is their willingness for their agent to communicating the LIVE availability with the Alaska agent to arriving to a workable itinerary. We will need to be patient as they sort things out...
This may be a plausible excuse after the fact, but the root cause is a problem of Alaska's own creation, which I have said previously here.
It comes from 2 things:
- a deliberate or look-the-other-way strategy of making partner awards hard to redeem for what they probably believe are cost benefits, (making it harder leads to less redemption - see also the ridiculous $12.50 partner booking fee)
- a contributing factor of being incentivized to avoid the cost of improving the fare query/availability engines to display and be able to book the tickets properly.
Fares and availability certainly
can be displayed properly between carriers -- many partners are able to with few problems. AS just chooses not to put the resources/cost in to getting them in sync. Which causes us headaches as passengers trying to book, and actually costs them in people tying up their phone representatives with stupid questions that could be answered if their systems worked right. So they shoot themselves in the foot trying to to save a buck.
The sad thing is, the space gets booked in the end anyway, so Alaska hasn't saved on any redemption costs really. They've only created more work and less satisfaction for everyone.