Originally Posted by
flyingzzzd's
Seriously don’t start me on this issue! But now you have -rant coming……
I had the displeasure last month of experiencing JL’s policy of no assistance when you’ve booked an AA codeshare. I only booked through AA because JL’s website wouldn’t work! Not any itinerary I managed to find. Was a multi-leg one way fare USA to Asia -so you’d think JAL would have that worked out!
I tried EVERYTHING over a 2week period before the flights and JL would not let us even view the booking let alone select seats as OWE.
MH, QR, CX, RJ, BA, QF even AY website work arounds, ‘insider access’ (through friend that’s a TA), multiple call centres - AA, JL and CX (as we had 2 CX flights as well in itinerary), social media (all of them) plus email and chat! The only avenue that offered us any understanding, and tried to help, was AA agent working through their OneWorld desk.
This did get us bulkhead seats (that actually did stick) on the SEA to NRT JL flight, but everything else in regards to OWE recognition was a fight it as you go proposition.
Forget online checkin -we couldn’t even do at airport checkin for more than one flight at a time! It took us nearly 2 hours to check bags (and these we had to collect and recheck as we couldn’t check in properly). JL Agent at SEA basically said it’s not our fault you booked an AA codeshare and some of your flights are on CX -so you just have to checkin with each airline as you go! Seriously!
My husband and I fly a lot - both MillionMiler with AA and he’s now BA Gold (OWE). I make, and obsess over, all of our bookings. We have never had a more difficult IT experience!
To be fair, AA really did try to help and facilitated sending complaint/feedback over the issue to OneWorld.
On board JL and CX staff were amazing! CX even had a person waiting in NRT to escort us through transit security (without a boarding pass) to our departure gate to sort out our checkin and select seats (what was left!).
So to original poster -no online work arounds work anymore. Keep trying AA and ask them to contact JL Partner Desk and/or OneWorld desk. You definitely won’t get anywhere with JL. Our experience was they wouldn’t change anything if you book an AA codeshare- even on physical checkin nor at departure gate!
Bottomline is, if you book an AA codeshare you are ‘persona non grata’ to JL prior to the flight. Once onboard the service and OWE recognition is impeccable. Good luck!
Sorry about your experience… but I think something else had gone wrong with your booking in addition to the codeshare problem.
I have flown your route (USA-AA*JL-NRT-CX500-HKG) quite a few times with AA codeshare operated by JL, and while JL will basically pretend the booking does not exist until OLCI, checking in and bags has never been a problem once at the airport. It could be there’s a minor schedule change preventing JL from issuing your CX boarding pass, but even that shall not prevent bags from being tagged to final destination.
As for workaround for seat selection, I have never been able to get a bulkhead with the codeshares in advance. However, the MH website will allow me to select any other seats, but if I picked the bulkhead in Y, the seat will not confirm. CX website allows me to select a seating preference (window/aisle), and in my experience it assigns seats from front to back, again, not the bulkhead. Even when ticketed in W, JL will automatically move me out of the bulkhead if I had chosen it on MH or CX.
As for the NRT escort… Actually the point was to make you go through transit security. If you were flying JL (and possibly many other airlines) onward, you don’t have to clear transit security as the USA is considered ‘clean’. You could basically just walk out of the boarding gate to the departure lobby sorta by verbally declaring you are a transit pax with at most a cursory look at your docs. CX for some reason doesn’t believe that and requires all of its transit pax to go through security…