Imo it's only fair to blame the right people when it comes to having to claim missing flights. I have had (and still have) immense frustration with 3 partner flights not crediting amounting to nearly 40,000 TPs, 2 of which I'm still pursuing. None of that is AY's fault though.

As a consequence I've been looking into how the system works although there is precious little information around. Anyway AIUI at some point after the flight the marketing carrier marks the flight as flown and at some point after that the crediting process is initiated. The time this takes is down to the marketing carrier's IT. If the FF number is the marketing carrier's scheme then the process is internal. If it isn't then a message is generated and sent to the FF carrier. The time this takes is again on the marketing carrier's IT. Upon receipt the FF carrier then credits the account and the time this takes is on the FF carrier's IT.

So we can see three key things from that. Firstly everything is initiated by the marketing carrier; secondly there are multiple stages where delays can occur especially if the IT does one of more parts of the process in batches and thirdly there are multiple stages where it can go wrong. A missing credit can occur for multiple reasons. The marketing carrier's IT doesn't think you flew the flight, it applies it (or thinks it applied it) to an account with that carrier (the classic issue where a BAC number gets substituted when you use a lounge via BAC status when crediting elsewhere), it thinks it sent the credit message to the FF carrier but didn't, it did send the credit message to the FF carrier but it wasn't received, or was received and not processed or was rejected. Ergo most of the time a flight on a partner isn't credited is down to issues with the marketing carrier and not AY who can only credit what they receive.

My summary is this. The OW system is very random in terms of the time taken and I put that down to the transactions being processed in batches in most cases but flights credit automatically most of the time for most people. My 3 failed flights are all BA codeshares on other metal so there is a common denominator and the one that has been resolved was a BA IT issue. I'm expecting the other 2 will prove to be the same issue. I have an open case with BA trying to establish why three flights with identical characteristics all failed to credit when both BA and AY say they should have. BA's customer service response times seem to have expanded enormously in recent weeks but I imagine I'll get an answer eventually.