Originally Posted by
UserMark
The online tool has plenty of issues, but sabre has many as well. Some that I have found:
1. It fails with MH codeshares operated by QR
2. It fails if you try to use all 6 segments in North America. You have to leave one off, as a surface segment.
3. It counts an extra continent when it shouldn't. For example with some itineraries when I've added JFK-EZE-JFK it jumps from 4 continents to 6. Also something like SYD-JNB-LHR seems to add Asia.
I've long suspected that the route maps for these fares in Sabre are wrong, but I don't understand how to read them. Usually route maps are cities but for the explorer fares, route maps contain only numbers.
So you are probably the victim of a bad route map for your desired itinerary. Probably there's not much you can do other than ask an airline to do the ticketing. Also you can try swapping in DFW-LHR-JNB instead of DFW-DOH-LHR. Or similarly JNB-LHR-CMN.
You're indeed correct, it is a Sabre issue. The travel agent I am working with was able to find the errors in the route map that you mentioned and has elevated them to Sabre support, but they need to talk to QR and RJ (the airlines involved in the examples we presented). We got it to price in Amadeus finally, but had to remove one TYO stopover to get it, so even Amadeus still seems imperfect on this routing.
Now we're battling a new issue. It's actually much better for me for positioning to go ex-India, but that one refuses to price unless CX is the first carrier, it will not price JL DEL-HND or BLR-NRT. So now trying one final option in Asia before throwing in the towel and just dealing with my costly positioning back from OSL at the end. I'm actually also able to get ex-JNB to price as well on the same general itinerary (some orders swapped around, and had to price it with CX as first carrier since QR doesn't work in the tool) and it's pretty much the same price as ex-OSL, but I have the same exact positioning issue there. I'm positioning to any of the starting points from CAI, so that's not too bad, but getting back to Japan from JNB or OSL isn't cheap with cash or miles.