Originally Posted by
caliform
Can confirm retroclaim will work fine.
OK, back from the trip and I confirm that retroclaim indeed works fine.
Until we encountered a major *-up: I did online checkin for the MNL-JED-DXB flights of course without being able to enter my wife's FB-Number; so FQTV was "none*. At checkin something must have happened as of course the agents scanned my wife's passport and encountered the name mismatch. No problem they said, took the passport and disappeared for some good 15-20 minutes. Then they came back and continued checking us in. Stupidly we didn't check again the boarding passes of my wife… so later upon arrival at home after the two day stopover in DXB, I wanted to retroclaim the miles and saw that there was an AlFursan membership number on the boarding passes of my wife! Some detective work later including a long call with Saudias AlFursan hotline in Jeddah, I found out that the account must have been made before our departure in MNL with a false passport number, bogus email and phone number. The agent blamed the OTA for creating this account which I don't quite believe because of the suspicious behaviour of the MNL checkin staff. So we have no access to this AlFursan account because the agent could not change anything without a PIN from either one of the bogus emails or phone numbers. So I put it in writing to AlFursan that this account had to be flagged as fraudulent and also that they should remove the credited flights. I also reached out to Flying Blue to get in touch with the Saudis regarding this issue, however my hopes aren't very high. Well, there's a lesson to be learned from this:
From now on, I will always double check any boarding pass issued by an agent for correct information on it. This whole episode might be a scam and is of course not at all related to the issue of travellers who "just opened an account with the airline to see my reservation" resulting in unintentionally opening a frequent flyer account - which of course I didn't, as we frequent travellers all know that one can access any reservation with just the PNR! I will update as soon as I have a result of our queries with the Flying Blue fraud department and AlFursan.