Well the story turns out ok, but only after weeks.
I’ve been trying to get award seats in Business of First for the last few weeks to Australia in February. There is absolutely nothing going out of the west coast on United for the times that I wanted so I started looking at going through Europe. I had done some searches on the ANA tool and came up with a good itinerary in first on Thai out of London. Called up the to make the reservation. Sorry Mr. XXX, we don’t show any of that being available. United can’t get that from Thai airlines. We can get you there through Asianna on Dates that you don’t want or we could get you there in coach.
I’m not doing a 20+ hour flight in coach, isn’t gonna happen.
So I call back over and over again. Most of the time it’s very nice people with the name “Bob” who you know are sitting half way across the world from you and who will follow the rules to a tee and not go out of their way to be helpful. This happened many, many times to the point where I was just going to give up on the whole idea. Then for some reason I called today to enquire again.
I got a very helpful person who was sitting in Chicago I’m pretty sure. I told her what I wanted to do, LHR-SIN or BKK and then Syd and back. I have looked at these routes and Singapore Air and Thai Air service the routes but the many people I had talked to before just couldn’t find any premium seats. Somehow this person did. I now have two Business class tickets on Singapore Airlines from London to SYD. I’ll purchase a ticket from IAD to LHR for around $600.00. So a 9k ticket for about $900.00 total and a couple of days of my life
I guess I’m relaying the story trying to find out a few things. Are agents allowed to ditch the starnet (I think that’s what it’s called) and directly contact the other airlines? If not, how did the person above get us the tickets? Do you just need to keep calling back until you get the right person?
It’s all a mystery to me.