NWIFlyer

It's officially written somewhere, just not public! It's only by being a member of FT I found out about it, and now I'm just passing it on .

I suspect you can thank a former mod of both the BD and this illustrious forum, @GoldCircle, for the knowledge, and I'm hoping by tagging him he might return with more useful advice than my general synopsis.

I believe it's just an acknowledgement that stops the clock, but it may need a refusal as well - it's worth an ask at least.

What protects customers in the end is that it's in the interests of the FFP to get the flight credited, because they will actually then take money in from the operating airline - so it's worth persevering with A3.

Alex1986

I just called A3. Swiss Air never replied, not even acknowledged receipt of the request. I told them about forcing the credit of miles but they told me it's not possible, there is no process like this in place, and that we just have to wait for Swiss Air to reply at some point.

I think I have lost any hope of getting these miles

NWIFlyer

It's not a usual procedure, but I would be confident it still exists. I suspect you just got an agent who didn't know about it because they'd never been asked - it's not exactly well known!

HUACA might work here.

Alex1986

What is HUACA?

NWIFlyer

Hang Up and Call Again ...

Alex1986

hahahaha no use, I have spoken to so many A3 agents in the past 6 months it's ridiculous. I believe by now they all know of my case. They all mention the same thing, we need to wait for Swiss Air to reply, which seems like they will simply never do...

gpb_croppers63

It really seems like you need help from someone at LX here. I know you said you'd got in touch with the Swiss lurker but maybe tagging here will help? I hope so at least! Paging @SwissInternationalAirLines

LTN Phobia

With LX bookings, you should be able to see the actual booking class for each flight in the confirmation email.

Before you pursue anything else, I recommend you check the booking class for each flight in the confirmation email you received from LX when you booked the flights.

GoldCircle

Rumours of my brilliance are greatly overstated, I fear. My memories of this are incredibly sketchy and the SOPs, SLAs and the number of people who give a damn about the customer may well have changed in the intervening years. There was a Star Alliance powerpoint briefing (or possibly it was a training doc) about /picks number/ 6 or 7 years ago which pointed out the required standards for entry and basic tenets required for operating a *A FFP. The turnarounds were mentioned - and the numbers here don't seem too far fetched.

I'm not sure they were ever intended for the customer eyes - and I'm certain you'd never get to use them in any enforcement. Each airline has - and does - have control of its own SOPs.

I rather suspect that 2 letters, in old-fashioned writing, one to each legal entity, CC-ing the other, outlining the situation and requesting them to directly contact each other within a specified time-frame to resolve the matter might be the way forward? At the end of the day, some battles will be lost. This may be one of them.

Or you could just point to Aegean and say that you've done your bit - repeatedly - and would they just award the paltry number of miles as a gesture of good will - and then move on.

In the old days BD's Diamond Club used to do this for my fortnightly missing Swiss miles. Then one day about a year later, Swiss flushed their system and I had a windfall of duplicate miles. I miss those days.

Tokyoite

@Alex1986 how did it go? Did you check your booking codes as advised? Called in?

Alex1986

Let me provide everyone here with an update.

This is the reply I got from A3:

"More specifically, Swiss claim that miles have been approved for credit to the frequent flyer number: 23456789, which was wrongly depicted under the reservation. The fore-mentioned number does not correspond with any valid Account on our Program, but still the operating airline does not give us the authority to credit those miles on your Account [123456789]."

So, Swiss claims that the number was incorrectly depicted in the reservation (missing the first digit of my account number). Now what is funny is that for the inbound flight I got the miles automatically; if the number was incorrectly depicted in the reservation then why were the inbound miles correctly credited but not the outbound? Food for thought.

What is even funnier is that I cannot credit these miles to a Miles & More account either. Because the miles appear as credited to this non-existent Miles & Bonus account.

So, to sum-up, these miles appear as credited to a non-existent account (not someone else's account, but a non-existent one, how is this even possible, to credit miles to an account that does not exist?). Hence, I cannot request them to any Star Alliance account, because they have already been credited to the non-existent account.

LOL

KLouis

The logic of Swiss’ arguments remind me of the logic I encountered a few decades ago when talking to the person responsible for tech matters in a big public building in a major Swiss University: a couple of electricians were installing emergency lights at the end of a long corridor, close to a staircase. No emergency lights had been planned to be installed close to the main staircase located roughly in the middle of the corridor. When asked why this was the case, the answer was “there is never a power outage in Switzerland, thus it’s not really necessary”. Asked why they were installing the emergency lights close to the secondary staircase, the answer was “fin case there is a power outage”.

PS1 Only a few years after that, a complete blackout “hit” Western Switzerland for more than a day. I was then living in the US, so I had no chance to talk to the person with whom I had the conversation…

PS2 No attacks against Switzerland here: I’m 25% Swiss myself and I love both country and people!

frenchft

Check the booking class carefully because LX credit on very few economy fares to A3.