bawm

Yes, the 18th is the correct new date, it was announced yesterday externally.

24left

So, as of yesterday, the 18th is the new correct date. But what about as of next Tuesday... will the correct date change again?

Bohemian1

All depends, is October a leap-month?

canadiancow

On the bright side, all my EYW flying will be done by then.

But I may be flying within two days of that switchover, which could be interesting.

YYZFlyboy

I doesn't bode well that Amadeus can't handle flight numbers with stops en-route (eg AC33/34 YYZ-YVR-SYD). So AC had to abandon all their same plane flight numbers that had stops and make them separate flight numbers. Not a very sophisticated system if it can't even handle that....................... no?

RangerNS

Design choice. There is some level of cruft built up with 80+ years of airline ticketing rules, in Air Canadas case over 50 years of in-house IT solutions.

There is really no modern reason for route numbering like that anymore; not implementing stuff that only exists for historical reasons is probably a great idea.

Fiordland

Air France does weird things like this with flights to Africa. There are also the odd ones where the aircraft leaves Paris, does two stops then returns to Paris.

Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa and SAS founded Amadeus. British Airways also does these types of flight and is on Amadeus.

Why AC can't do the same thing on Amadeus is an interesting question to ask?

mountainboy

Maybe the dateline crossings?

RangerNS

When did the dateline move to Africa?

zrh2yvr

Firstly - this is crazy - because it can really mess up some fares which have a limit on "transfers" as now an extra transfer may be required for some routes.

Second - I wonder if the other flights in the Amadeus systems which run multiple stops with the same flight number basically don't board any local passengers at the mid-point and thus can make it work. It's all a bit strange that this is not possible. . . For example - LX 294 is a circle trip ZRH-NBO-DAR-ZRH.

how can that one be handled but somehow AC can't do GVA-YUL-YYZ??

D582

This is nothing to so with Amadeus's capabilities - it can easily handle flights with multiple stops and is much more of a powerful system than RESIII.

This is about making one of the most significant system transitions for any airline to go through the simplest as possible. Two reasons:

1. Training. Working multi-stop flights will always be slightly different and more complex than non-stop flights. Even today on flights like AC33, the agents in YYZ have to manage the different OFF points as two flights. Removing multi-stop flights right now eliminates the requirement to deal with this scenario and keeps things simple and uniform.

2. Transition integration. AC is not moving EVERYTHING to Amadeus overnight. They are only first cutting over RES. Once that is stabilised, they will transition airport DCS to Amadeus in waves. So they will be a multiple hybrid situations where RES is Amadeus and DCS is current and has to interface. And then RES and some airports are Amadeus whereas others are current DCS. Not having multi-stop flights at the moment makes this easier.

Fiordland

Where this shows up all the time are flights that involve an intermediate stop in another country. BA flights to Australia usually involve a stop somewhere. Air France flight to Tahiti involves a stop in California. I believe it has to have the same flight number to be legal as it is a continuation of a flight that starts in the airlines home country. They do sell the second segments independently.

Jebby_ca

Found this: https://travel360benelux.com/nl/air-...s-altea-suite/

Seems like night of Nov 18 / 19 is the current cutover date...

bigev007

Well, my 5am Atlantic time flight on the 19th should go either swimmingly or be a nightmare then. Good thing it's a nice long 70 min transborder connection

24left

Jebby_ca

Thanks for the link.

Courtesy of Google Translate :

"During the switchover from RESIII to Altéa, on the night of November 18-19, all Air Canada ticketing and reservation facilities will be offline for some time. Air Canada Contact Centers, aircanada.com, aircanada.com/agents and related GDS links are not available from anywhere between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern Time (13-15 hours Belgian time) and that for a maximum of 12 hours.

All Air Canada flights and airport services, including the check-in kiosks, are available during that time. However, tickets, new reservations and additional services for existing reservations cannot be entered. Seat configurations can also not be consulted, nor can seat preferences be reserved. E-ticketing facilities are also unavailable. Flight information is not provided via the GDS but remains available on aircanada.com and aircanada.com/agents."..........


I wonder if this will make those regular "down for maintenance" pages from Aeroplan look like fun. Well, perhaps pack some extra snack and extra patience.