Originally Posted by moonsidian

I just went through the process of booking an award flight online out of HKG. Or so I thought. The site hung for a minute when I clicked on the last payment button, and then crapped out, showing me a raw JSON response, containing a "message" field with the value "An invalid response was received from the upstream server".

I opened the Cathay Pacific mobile app on my phone and it showed the flight as confirmed, along with a reference number. Was able to select my seat as well. However I received no email confirmation, my credit card wasn't charged, and no miles were deducted from my account.

At the top of the 'Manage booking' page in the app was a message reading, "You must complete payment and issue ticket by 12:00 Tue 16 May 2023 (+0800 time)." But there was no option to reenter payment info or anything like that.

A few minutes later, pulled down to refresh, and the booking, which had JUST said Confirmed, was gone.

I don't think I've ever had a more frustrating experience booking a flight. There's now a 30-minute wait just to enter the website, but I'm betting the flight I was looking at is gone now anyway.