canadiancow

I'm fairly certain AC has turned off their duplicate booking cancellation system. It might come back after COVID, but it might not.

However, UA's is still running, so while redeeming for 2 YYZ-YVR flights on the same day is safe, don't assume you can do that with all partners. I've had a few Aeroplan bookings with UA segments get cancelled by UA because I had booked something like FRA-SFO and LAX-SFO on the same day.

mileageking

AC prohibits duplicate bookings and would not permit a passenger to hold more than one confirmed reservation/ticket on the same departure flight/origin and destination for the same travel date.

But what if someone did YYZ-YUL-YYZ and again same return trip same day but no overlapping flights?

rankourabu

I dunno... Like with everything AC - it seems to be broken.
For a week I was booked twice on two different Aeroplan reservations on the same exact flight before I even realized, I'd probably be still booked if I didnt cancel..... never mind same exact dates.

Adam Smith

Historically, one could have booked that without a problem. Sometime in 2019 or 2020 (after the Amadeus switch, I think), they started auto-cancelling bookings like that.

They would also auto-cancel if you had flights at conflicting times, e.g. if you had YYC-YYZ and YYC-YUL departing at the same time, even though that's not prohibited under the tariff. But as I said, even that was inconsistent.

There's a whole thread on that on the board already, and if we're going to have an in-depth discussion on that subject, I would request (with my moderator hat on) that we move that dialogue over to that thread so as to keep this one on topic.

But that system should certainly not cancel a booking where there are no flights on the same day (i.e. it should not impact @TheCanuckian), even if the cow is wrong and it's still running.

CanadianMike

With the generous policy on risk free bookings (free cancellations and 1x free change), were there DP's of AP automatically cancelling people's bookings if you made multiple bookings and the dates overlapped?

Adam Smith

Overlap in what way? Are you talking about having flights at conflicting times, e.g. August 25, book on both a 7AM YYZ-YVR and a 7AM YYZ-YUL flight, or something that would just be unlikely to be flown, e.g. trip 1 YYZ-ATH August 25, return ATH-YYZ September 10 + trip 2 YYZ-ATH August 30, return ATH-YYZ September 15?

Conflicting flights, we have had some experiences of flights being cancelled since the transition to Amadeus, but inconsistent. The latter type that's simply unlikely, I don't think we've had any of those get cancelled.

canadiancow

I think they turned off the auto-canceller sometime during COVID, but I'm not sure its current state.

I did have a booking cancelled before they turned it off that WAS possible to fly.

I wasn't sure if I was going to YUL on a Tuesday (then YYZ on Wednesday) or just YYZ on Wednesday.

I booked YVR-YYZ and YUL-YYZ on the same date, but separated by enough time that I easily could have flown the booked flights with another YYZ-YVR in the middle. So their system was very aggressive at cancelling things.

You should assume if you book flights that are impossible to fly (like Adam's example, or even a 6pm YYZ-LHR and 10pm YYZ-YVR), that one will be cancelled.

Pseudo Nim

It’s the weirdest thing, but it seems like that’s not ALWAYS the case. I’ve had awards that insta-cancelled, and I’ve had others that asked for confirmation. It’s a complete mystery as to which. I’m going to hazard a guess - unless anyone can prove otherwise - that legacy awards are insta-cancelled, while new program ones aren’t, because they want to divest from the legacy awards as fast as possible.

canadiancow

Mark Nasr mentioned on one of the live streams that legacy bookings were behaving like that.

But not for the reason you suggest. It was, as usual, Hanlon's razor.

Edit: On another matter, I'm happy to report that I received a priority reward the same day my SQD posted to cross a threshold. Now if only eUps and gifts were as fast...

CanadianMike

ie. making speculative bookings
I have a one way reward booking October 14th.

Could I make other speculative bookings that conflict with this itinerary?
ie. another booking departing October 14th and return sometime in November?

OZtrav

I have two long-haul flights (xxx-YUL and yyy-YUL) booked for the same day.

I intend to cancel one of them since I can't possibly fly both, but I don't know which one just yet (and I think AC might actually not fly one of them, perhaps both). I hope they don't get cancelled by AC!

Adam Smith

I thought I had posted about this back in October; perhaps it was just discussed in a virtual Do or in person, but I didn't agree with the premise that the auto-cancellation had been turned off altogether.

At one point in October with my UFP, I was holding bookings departing YYC on the same date for YYZ, YUL, and YVR. I think two of them left at 7AM and one left at 6AM, or maybe two at 6AM and one at 7AM. Either way, it was impossible to fly 2/3 of those, but they stayed intact for several days, maybe a week (I think I cancelled 2 of them after check-in had opened because I had finally decided what I wanted to do). But they did eventually cancel a YOW-YYC booking for the following day, which I don't think actually conflicted with any other bookings (and I'm not even sure it was impossible to fly it based on any of the bookings from the previous day).

The concierge looked in to it for me, and the "bot" that cancelled it flagged a particular PNR as conflicting, even though there was no conflict between those two PNRs, and I believe it would have been theoretically possible to fly both.

So I'll agree that the bot can be aggressive, and it's possible that they dialled it back during COVID, but I don't think it was ever disabled entirely. Nor do I think it's a very good tool, since it has a tendency to cancel PNRs that (a) don't conflict and (b) don't contravene the AC tariff, while simultaneously not catching PNRs that (a) do conflict or (b) are against the rules of the tariff.

Can you make them? Absolutely. Will they be cancelled? Hard to say. That's what we're debating in this thread.

YYZ1313

Is there a rule against having two reward bookings on the same day? I have a flight to Iceland for next month but they're having a big spike of cases so I'd like to book a back-up flight to another country just in case.

Bartolo

I had two bookings in the spring. One on AC and one on UA. The original booking on AC was changed several times (by them) due to flight/route cancellations. The newest itinerary change I had involved a UA segment.

Consequently, I made a UA booking separately a few weeks before the flight to have a better (and cheaper) routing. The day after I got an email from UA stated they had cancelled my UA (revenue) flight. I was cancelling the AC flight that day but just hadn’t got to it.

Long story short, UA was able to resurrect the booking and seats after a long time on the phone. I cancelled AC. The UA flight was oversold so this could have had an unfortunate ending. Thankfully, didn’t.

Note: tx were different routings, no segments in common, only original departure city the same, departure on same day but many hours apart, one tx was US to Canada and the other US to US.

canadiancow

That's a UA system, and only impacts you if you have bookings with overlapping UA segments.

AC's not doing anything there.