FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Oneworld booking and pricing experiences

Oct 6, 2024 | 6:42 am

#2537

zoombee

Join Date: Mar 2008

Location: London, UK

Programs: AY Platinum (BA refugee), AA liftime gold

Posts: 689

Quote:

Originally Posted by jagmeets

Apologies- I type this from a bustling hole in the wall eatery in BKK.

I just ticketed an exJP DONE3 at the old fares.

Details later, but here’s what worked for me- timeline in brackets:
1. book online with the first sector with CX (04Oct/~noon SIN). This makes it a CX ticket (at the QF fares, I think), and payment info is taken, but not charged. You have to call to get them to send a payment link.
2. call to change (regular line- I get a CX Diamond priority, but was still dumped to the MNL call Center)- do not pay- the call centre will see the ow website fare- I changed a DFW-BCN-MAD to a DFW-DOH-MAD
agent couldn’t process/figure out if it was allowed, sent to the manual pricing team (04Oct/~1400 SIN), supposedly on ‘Diamond Priority’
3. got an email with the required itinerary (05Oct/2120 SIN- it’s Saturday night in HKG!)
4. got a call that I missed (immediately after the above)
5. got a payment link that I paid through (10 mins after the above) with the CX filed fares.

The phone agent being unable to just make the change might have been the key.

etickets in the inbox, base fare of JPY 656,300/492,300 per Adult/Child.

A long post of gratitude to the regulars in this thread, and especially dvs7310 & of course pandaperth , with experiences with the engine, and a saga of mistakes, laziness, confidence with the first rtw (lack thereoff) etc will hopefully follow in the coming days (tight tax filing deadlines etc to be dealt with).

Making the change on the phone seems to have been in order to get the base fare as per filed by CX (which hasn't increased yet). FYI I've been able to price itineraries online starting CTS-HKG which use that base fare. It will still then ask you to call Cathay but if that itinerary suits you (or you're happy to just ticket and change the non-first-segment routing later on the basis you should be able to) then the phone task is a simpler matter of asking for a payment link.

If you want to make routing changes before ticketing, ideally go in only needing to make date changes and swapping a minimal number of segments without changing the segment count. In my case I was adding segments and it has taken polite considered insistence (and ~2hrs, mostly to make the changes) to have them not worry about validity and instead have that checked by the back office. Front line staff I spoke to, and their direct supervisors, seem to have been told tickets have a maximum of "5 stopovers, 2 transit, and then, 2 open jaw". I got the same from the whatsapp team before.

Last edited by zoombee; Oct 6, 2024 at 6:44 am Reason: typos

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