Originally Posted by
orbitmic
To be honest, I think you may be making this a bit more complicated than it needs to be. Again, multiple other airlines and OTAs allow passengers to attach any FFP number to a booking without prejudging whether they can lead to benefits or not. I'm not aware any of them has been on the hot seat for GFPR compliance on those grounds. To my knowledge, no airline stores any such information directly by the way, they just use GDSs such as Amadeus and Sabre which do not restrict the FFP information you can enter on a given booking and store the data on their own systems.
No I promise I am not making it complicated. It's really all about database engineering and getting different systems to return the right results (e.g. entitlements, etc) and that is non-trivial.
Amadeus and Sabre are designed to serve a multitude of airlines irrespective of alliance, so they would by design have more inputs compared to any individual airline's system because they must.
The person immediately below your most recent reply correctly understands the issue. SAS IT probably isn't advanced enough to allow you enter in a non-*A number today because it uses some sort of primary key (probably the EB number) to link it to the *A database. I am.sure SAS IT are diligently working on the coding to make the alliance switch. They certainly could use the time to update their code to handle non- alliance FFNs, although they'd also need to code how to respond to such data. I'm also certain it will be ready before 1 September (even if the change is not accessible to us before then). Like everyone else is saying, also certain that there will be a few days after go live where everything needs manual verification.
There are at least three databases here which all have to work seamlessly with each other on Day 1 (your travel record, your EB profile, the airline alliance connection to make sure benefits are consistently applied). All of which needs to appear so seamless that one thinks it's as simple as just having a field to enter what essentially is any random text/number string. In the sevond week of September, if this all goes well, give any SAS IT person you know a hug. They don't always get it right, but they'll have earned this one.