Originally Posted by
vsflyhigh
I'm not sure how someone here managed to book one of these flights. I'm not aware of any colleagues who were successful in booking these flights.
[...]
I'm not sure why others can book it with other airlines but that's the reason why you can't book with us. Maybe we're just waiting for the government approval before we start selling these flights but this issue has been escalated.
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I find it very unlikely this has anything to do with the route approval. If ANA is allowing to book it, why would Virgin second guess it? There have been other routes in the past that were still pending approval and this issue has never came up. (Granted, I don't recall that new routes are a particular problem either)
I would put my money on some syncing issue with the apparently outdated system that Virgin is using to access ANA.
Maybe the work around is something like Virgin creates a booking and some ANA staff member added the segment, which Virgin then was able to ticket. That obviously wouldn't scale well if many people want to do it. The unicorn here seems to be that some staff members are able to talk to ANA, meanwhile most deny that this is possible at all. While I could understand why this isn't practical in this situation, its really bad when ANA cancels flights and one is suddenly stuck without a flight.