I have been looking for flights to China again. AY priced quite okay (cheapest) but they have had some trouble being on-time and I recently got EBG back so I decided to go for Star Alliance.

But not with SAS, Air China instead. Yeah, could be interesting experience but let's see, so far they have been excellent in domestic flights.

Air China cannot sell TMP-ARN-TMP because there isn't codeshare. So I decided that I could book that with SAS then.

I noticed that

• it is impossible to choose any other city than Beijing in flysas.fi web booking engine, there are codeshare flights with SK flight number to some domestic destinations but the web booking engine doesn't know about those
• SK/KF/Star Alliance reservations in Finland (the expensive one) was able to find all but domestic flights (and only after I told the exact flight numbers I wanted), the missing ones weren't available for them - they couldn't find those even with CA number
• Internet support investigated the problem related to web booking engine and then informed me that ARN-PEK on CA aren't bookable in the web because SAS flies to Beijing with their own plane, no matter that CA has completely different arrival time and much better for me, they suggested to call their reservations and when I told that they couldn't help me there, there wasn't explanation ("sometimes the flights just aren't bookable")

Of course SAS wants to direct the passengers to their own flights, but why restrict the codeshare domestic flights? And if those are showing in ExpertFlyer then why cannot even SAS themselves to book those flights without a problem? And Air China flights ARN-PEK-ARN have SK codeshare too ...

In this point I remembered why I don't deal with airlines directly ... stupid me for spending time and money to call SAS when it was totally useless. Air China was very helpful but they couldn't sell me TMP-ARN-TMP, which was understandable I guess.

So I called American Express and told them that I have very specific routing that I want. I was pretty sure that if SAS cannot find the flights and book those then Amex cannot either - I guessed wrong, after a 30 minutes in the phone I had my itinerary just like I wanted. And cheaper than what SAS was able to offer me over the phone (with missing domestic flights in China).

Oh, and according to ExpertFlyer all the flights had availability.