jackal

EXACTLY.

If it was on EK's end, the AS agents would not have been able to find and sell it using Direct Access. The fact they could when the web search tool could not is pretty compelling evidence that there are flaws in the web search tool.

Fixing the web tool, not preventing agents from helping loyal customers by artificially blocking them from using the tools they have access to, is the correct response by AS management.

nemme99

Ugh. Of course this happens right before I'm going to book a trip in February. EF=1 not showing up on Alaska's website on the day I want to go. Two days before there is space (EF=2 and on Alaska's site) but I'm already taking 3 weeks off. Asking for three weeks plus two days just to fit Alaska's technological deficiencies isn't going to fly with my boss.

pdxasflyer

This, precisely. For travelers who work and need to plan months ahead with the need to prearrange time off (and perhaps lack the flexibility of planning aspirational trips 2 weeks prior to departure), tech issues like this add insult.

Instead of not allowing agents to book award travel via Direct Access, why not continue to allow it until the website issue is fixed, then remove the Direct Access, ostensibly since it won't be necessary. I try to understand AS's perspective, but in this case, I fail to understand why that would be hard for AS to do?

PacNWFlyer

I've been watching this conversation unfold and I think it's time I add a few clarifications. I really don't want this to sound harsh (even though I know it has the potential to be perceived that way), so please understand that my intent here is to inform and educate. Hopefully it's helpful and doesn't produce a stream of hate-mail to my in-box.

First, this supposition that direct access is right and alaskaair.com is wrong or that expert flyer is the most accurate data source is simply misleading and incorrect as it oversimplifies the complexities of how inventory is loaded, managed, and shared between systems across multiple airlines. The fact is that the various inventory systems are never 100% in-sync with each other, ever (although in most cases, they have an impressive success rate in the high 90th percentile). What that means for award searches is that sometimes inventory is available via alaskaair.com that wouldn't have been available through direct access and vice-versa. Sometimes direct access would have produced results in your favor and other times it does the opposite. Neither of them ever matches another carrier's host inventory environment 100%, they just mismatch in different, relatively minor ways. Sometimes in your favor & sometimes not. It's interesting to me that the alaskaair.com tool doesn't get as much credit as it should for finding inventory that direct access would report as unavailable.

The solution is not to let agents and customers search multiple inventory systems and then use whichever one creates the most advantage for a given customer under any given set of circumstances. That's unwieldy, expensive, and unsupportable over the long term even if it could potentially benefit you personally under a fairly narrow set of circumstances. Instead, the solution is to provide a single inventory search solution, reduce the 'error' rate wherever feasible, and embrace the results. Nobody can argue that the new 'single' solution provides a lot more options than the previous one did, making it easy to argue that it's far superior to the old one (again, even if in a narrow set of circumstances a customer can't book a seat they otherwise could have... it's more than offset by the number of customers that get seats they wouldn't have gotten with the old system).

Here's where I get up on my tiny little soap-box for a second. When redeeming Alaska miles for award seats, instead of asking yourself whether or not space is available in system A, B, or C, please ask whether or not it's available via AlaskaAir.com (or the call center for Cathay Pacific & LAN - for now, anyway). Searching for award space through other GDSs, expert flyer, other carrier websites, etc., just sets you up for disappointment and failure. The only relevant question when redeeming Alaska miles is whether or not inventory is available via Alaska's standard search tool. If it is, you can book the space. If not, it doesn't matter whether or not space appears to be available in another system. OK, getting down from my tiny soap-box now...

Resolving these inventory mismatch issues 100% (vs the high 90%s as it is today) is not technically feasible for any airline. I haven't seen any airline, including well-funded ones like Emirates, find a way to justify changing this for revenue fare buckets, let alone award buckets. It's a point of diminishing returns thing, I suppose. The best available solution for awards is what Alaska did - to move toward a single inventory system wherever possible to reinforce the perception of consistent results, meaning that the res agent and the website (and the mobile app - check it out!) all tell customers 'yes' and 'no' identically, thereby reducing incentive to hyper-monitor multiple inventory systems.

Hope that helps.

ASTechGuy

baliktad

Thanks for your perspective ASTechGuy. We're glad to have you here offering your thoughts and I don't want to dissuade you from continuing, so I'm hoping my thoughts don't come across as too harsh either.

Telling customers to 'just accept what we give you' is a situation that favors only AS, not the consumer. I get that it makes your job easier if no one ever complains about award availability, but we're not here to make anyone's job easier. We're here to get value out of our hard-earned miles.

If customers were to just accept the parent carrier's availability options as truth, would UA flyers ever have suspected or discovered StarNet blocking? 'Just accept what we give you' is acceptable in a marketplace where customers can reasonably go elsewhere to obtain alternatives. If I don't like the prices displayed on alaskaair.com, I can take my cash and go shop on delta.com or aa.com or even an aggregate search engine like kayak.com.

But if I don't like the awards available to me displayed on alaskaair.com, I can't take my AS Mileage Plan Miles anywhere else and redeem them. There's no other alternatives. And more importantly, there's no outside influences that would cause AS to improve availability. We've seen examples of this already with the 330 day booking window. AS is purposely and intentionally limiting award availability because they've decided it suits them. This has already had a detrimental effect on customers, including myself.

So rather than saying "don't look elsewhere, just trust us," I would like it a lot more if the response was "hey, we're also curious why alaskaair.com might not show award availability that should be there. Give us some examples, we'll go check it out and make it right." I don't buy this excuse that it's impossible to get right. It is possible with the right motivation. Customers fear that airlines are motivated to publish paid fares (because they profit when they sell a seat) but to hide or suppress award fares (because they don't profit when redeeming an award), whether that action is intentional or unintentional. Unfortunately, your response hasn't really done much to allay those fears.

SFO777

+1
Excellent post. It is indeed disappointing to read that AS is really not interesting in finding a solution to an obvious problem.
It's bad enough that you can't change class of service if F seats open on your connecting flight, but instead have to deal with the idiocy of having to cancel your entire reservation and hope that the inbound F seats are returned to award inventory. AS may not be able to control that one, but fixing an IT problem that can't find otherwise available F seats is certainly within AS' control if they wanted to.

jackal

I'm sorry, ASTechGuy, but nothing in your post satisfies SFO777's excellent point made above.

The fact that one system can see something and another can't means that EK has the seat available.

If EK has the seat available and one (or both) of your systems cannot see it, then anything else is just an excuse.

If EK has the seat available, then we have the right to be able to book it. Artificially limiting us from booking it by preventing your agents from using a tool that they would otherwise have access to is poor form on AS management's part.

By the way, UA no longer engages in StarNet blocking (and hasn't since the merger). I have yet to find an example where UA wasn't able to book a partner seat if the partner had space open. Sometimes United.com won't find or price out a particular routing, and sometimes the site errors out, but a call to UA and feeding the agent each segment manually has worked every time I've tried. You are now preventing your agents from doing the same thing.

flytoeat

Reading between the lines, the approach ASTechGuy is conveying to us insures that there will be less and less need for partner award booking agents. This will lead to a large reduction in expense that is already well underway.

Those of us who benefitted from the old way (20+ Qantas premium awards redeemed 352 days out) are simply out of luck. And even though this group necessarily involves a lot of elite customers, the cost saving is more important than providing the benefit to these customers.

PacNWFlyer

I may have done the Alaska team a disservice by not making it very clear that they have solicited lots of examples from customers and agents in order to make every reasonable attempt to align inventory as close as possible given the current industry-level technical constraints. While soliciting your specific example might make you feel better (and I'm happy to do it via PM if you'd like), we've reached the point with the research where we understand the problem and our options (such as they are) for overcoming it.

The root of the problem lies in minor technical constraints in messaging between various inventory host environments. That's not a problem Alaska or its inventory host provider can solve by themselves or together, even if the economic justification was there. It's an industry-level problem across all inventory systems, but clearly a minor one from the perspective of the GDSs and their customers (airlines) who would need to allocate resources to these kinds of collaborative efforts. It's simply cost prohibitive given when weighted against the tremendous success they demonstrate in the vast majority of cases.

My apologies if I implied that you shouldn't ever complain. My core point is that customers position themselves for disappointment by using non-Alaska tools (Expert Flyer, OA websites, etc.) to search for awards with Alaska miles. It's America gosh-darn-it, so express yourself to your heart's content if you don't like something. My message is simply that every reasonable step has been taken to minimize the problem in a cost-effective, sustainable way and that complaining about this issue (unlike other more solvable problems) won't change the underlying constraint that's out of this airline's (and every other individual airline's) control.

Maybe we should all get together and picket A4A?

ASTechGuy

SFO777

Maybe you should just let the (mostly excellent) partner desk agents do their job instead of prohibiting them from using the tools otherwise available. Seems to me that would solve your insurmountable IT issues.

jackal

You're completely side-stepping the point of this discussion.

The point of this thread isn't that you need to make the online tool perfect. We get that probably won't happen as long as the current infrastructure with GDSes is in place (which is likely to be our lifetimes).

But you have a tool--Direct Access--that allows looking up space segment-by-segment and doing things like confirming space as soon as a partner publishes it, even if it's in advance of the artificial 330-day window AS is now enforcing.

It is poor customer service to tell your agents not to use a tool that is available and works fine and to tell us we can only use the more hobbled system you now have in place.

crimsona

If AS shows seats available only when there are 2 First Class seats available, is that not considered a bug?

Seems to penalize solo travelers unnecessarily

PacNWFlyer

I'll say it one more time, sir, then I'll stop repeating myself - I promise. The partner desk agent's old tool did not find every last available seat in each partner's system. It had a failure rate that was greater than the current newer search tool, a fact we confirmed with more than a year of ongoing testing (although in fairness, the failure rate in both systems was exceedingly low - they're both pretty accurate overall). In many cases, we're finding seats in the new tool which still don't show up with the old tool, so anybody looking for those seats is obviously much better off than they were before.

My apologies (and I mean this sincerely) that your specific example didn't work out that way. Hopefully it helps to understand that the airline did the right thing for the vast majority of its customers since so many more of them are now able to redeem miles for flights than were before.

pdxasflyer

I'll second baliktad - Thank you for contributing. I remain impressed that airline representatives care enough to participate here and even if we don't always like or agree with every post, I deeply appreciate the chance to have a dialogue and a voice with the company in this way. Thanks!

I've personally seen both sides of this. I've noticed AS.com showing plenty of Z (first) award space available where EF shows nothing. A call to the partner desk confirmed and understood it was due to the fact that AS.com had not been given an update from EK to reflect it. On the flip side, I can see availability of Z1 on EF from DXB-SEA on a future date, but AS.com shows nothing.

This inventory search result has not changed in 3 weeks, and while I submit that I don't know how the various airline systems are supposed to work or speak with each other, isn't it reasonable to think that they would have reconciled in some way by now?

With the utmost respect intended, this needs an alternate perspective.

First, a brief mention that from a customer service approach, isn't creating advantage for the customer (assuming no 'give away' from AS as a result) something that fosters loyalty for that customer to continue giving AS their wallet share?

Second, I currently have an awared booking as result of Direct Access. Aside from the actual booking process, the 'search' took the agent no greater time and it didn't seem 'unwieldy' to her (or my time) to find the availability. In fact, it only took a few extra seconds. Now, that said, if 'expensive, unwieldy and unsupportable' over the long run means that AS is effectively working toward pure automation of the partner desk and shifting all award travel to online booking...I get it.

However, to present it another way: if a dual system provides an advantage to the customer that could result in greater opportunities (even in a few narrow circumstances) to book award travel and thus create greater loyalty and repeat business, isnt' that valuable to AS? (Not sure the cost vs reward balance, here, admittedly.)


If I had done this as a consumer, 4 of us would have not traveled in F on 2 segments back from JNB on CX last year. Granted, the circumstances were a slight bit different, but the gist is the same in that CX went through a massive IT system switch. The result was that they had additional award inventory open up and AS was powerless to see it. By a stroke of luck and a small dose of my perseverence to pose a simple question about manual work-arounds, I managed to connect a CX IT person and an AS person to make the booking - with both agreeing and wanting to find a solution for the customer. You bet the AS person got the biggest set of accolades from me I could muster (beyond and Expression of Thanks).

The point is - if the customer and a solution is important enough, this shouldn't be the point where AS puts its pencils down and stops working toward a better solution, even if the current one isn't perfect. I know I haven't stopped my queries on EF. And, when I do get a hit, I check both the partner airline's website or search tool as well as AS.com to see if they match. If AS.com doesn't match but the other two do, then I'll call to see what the partner agent can do.

As baliktad said, we worked hard to earn the miles, we'll work just as hard to use them, especially in an environment where it's getting harder to do so.


It does - and thank you, once again. None of my post is intended to offend, just constructive dialogue. My apologies for lack of brevity; just passionate on this particular subject.

baliktad

The root of the problem is that what AS things is "cost-effective" and "sustainable" may not be what customers believe are the right actions. Miles are effectively prepaid travel. We've paid for the right to access certain travel options upfront, in a nonrefundable manner. We've put our trust and our wallets in AS' hands. It's disappointing and borderline fraudulent for AS to then sit back and say "Oh, you can't access that thing that 1) you already paid us for and 2) our travel partners are making available? Oh well, try another date. I'm sure you can rearrange your schedule."

I have no need for placating assurances that AS knows what's best and has already done everything possible. The problem with that position is that every airline claims this, even when they intentionally block seats. If AS was truly committed to securing seats, they wouldn't blame IT snafus and industry-wide problems. A company dedicated to securing seats for its customers would say things like

"Book if you can online, but if an airline has an award seat available that you can't book online, call us up and we'll book it for you, even if it means calling up the partner directly." or...

"If a partner confirms an award seat is available and you can't book it on our web site, book it as a paid rate and we'll reimburse you." or how about...

"Our web site allows booking 330 days out because that was the cheapest option. But since we know some of the scarcest seats are only available at 350 days out, call us up and we can still manually book those. We know from experience that only 1% of our customers ever book seats in that timeframe, so it's not a big expense for us. We know those seats mean a lot to you."

Instead, what I see is a company whose primary motivation is minimizing the bottom line, and THEN providing the "best" possible awards within those budget constraints.

I don't mean to demean the hard work you or your coworkers do, but let's not conflate "we try hard within the budget we're given" with "we're providing customers with access to all the seats that they've prepaid for."