I was on a very complex OW trip through Europe. At the point where I experienced my difficulties, I was due to move from Helsinki to St Petersburg for a few days, then on to Edinburgh. With a 14 city tour like this, the logistics were equally complex involving many hotel award stays. Effectively, it locked me into specific days for each city.

Somehow in arranging for the very expensive visas for my family to enter Russia, something went awry. Given that much of the visa was in Cyrillic, I didn't look to closely, but it turns out my dates of entry and exit were off by two days. Of course, in very bureaucratic countries, this is a complete show stopper. FinnAir rightly refused to board us, as we would not have been granted entry into Russia.

Once I cancelled my arrangements in Russia, we turned to the question of what to do next. Having already spent time in Helsinki I preferred to go elsewhere, and the family was leaning towards accelerating our entry into Scotland.

However, FinnAir were totally unwilling to change anything. No change in date, no rerouting, no cancel of the segment from Russia. It would have resulted in the cancellation of the remainder of my trip once I failed to take the segments to and from St Petersburg. Very very unhelpful even with the supervisor involved.

Fortunately, there is always the home airline FF department to fall back upon. I called the EXP desk of AA and they were much more helpful. They rebooked my flight Helsinki to Edinburgh and removed the segments that were now infeasible.

Incredibly, the FinnAir staff were unwilling to check us in. They didn't care that AA had changed the reservations. In their mind, the OW trip was cast in stone and therefore voided itself with any change.

I ended up on the phone a few more times and the impasse was fixed only when AA faxed some specific authorizations to Finnair. I don't know if they tried to go back and collect cash from AA for the flight out of Helsinki or whether they are so rifdly bureacratic that nobody will move without a pile of CYA paper. Fortunately, I didn't need to care as we flew out of there a few hours later.

Our additional time in Scotland was a real highlight of the trip, worth the anxiety with the unhelpful OW partner.

This isn't a direct match to irregular ops, but I would imagine that the behavior will depend as much on the partner's attitude as on the general rules. I have asked to switch to earlier IB flights with great smiling results. BA were a delight to deal with. The inflight service and friendly FAs on Finnair were superb, so this isn't a general Finnair problem.