Cathay Pacific (CX) Award Redemption, Booking and Availability (2023)
 

Trying to book some CX flights for November 2023.

AS and AA both show availability (and AA doesn’t even show “only 2 left” or whatever). AS allows you to proceed all the way to the final payment stage, shows the “landing shortly” interstitial for close to a minute, then says no availability.

Tried calling regular reservations line, last night they said “MP is undergoing end of year maintenance, try tomorrow after 10 am PDT” (lol yeah right). Today they first said “oh the flight simply isn’t available”, then managed to actually pull it up on their end and hit the same error as we did online.

Any tips? Ideally this would be an Australia to JFK trip, but tried all the options — SYD-HKG-JFK, MEL-HKG-JFK, HKG-JFK, SYD-HKG. Tried both 1 passenger and 2 passengers. Always the same result, shows availability on the flight selection page, takes forever at processing payment, and never takes.

FWIW was able to book FJ flights last night. I guess maybe they were doing maintenance because I got 4 confirmation emails — one immediately after ticketing and 3 more identical ones 40 minutes later.

Read upthread, this is a known issue. AA and AS show phantom space and cannot currently be trusted to verify CX availability. Try using BA and QF to check.

Using QF/BA to check the only valid J I see on CX from SYD to JFK in November is 1J on Nov. 23. SYD-HKG-JFK with a short connection. This shows up on an AS search and I suspect would be bookable.

Edited to Add: The only pair of flights with 1J on 11/23 arrives in HKG at 3:05 pm and departs 4:20 pm. You would see this checking on QF, but added here for clarification since there are many other pairs showing on AS 11/23 that probably are not bookable.

Did these 4 bookings actually go through all the way to being booked and not errored out?

yes, tickets issued and I was able to pick seats on FJ’s website for that leg.

edit: to be clear, it was a single booking for two passengers. AS just decided to send 4 confirmation emails for the same res.

I was looking earlier in the thread but it seemed some people said there was more phantoms and some people were saying less lol.

Thanks for the info and checking availability, much appreciated. I actually started this search on BA's and QF's websites but just could not put up with the atrocious website experience (BA gave me some error about being unable to check for availability for a flight with stopovers??)

BA *is* showing availability in PE for my desired dates. Would it make sense to book that for the desired dates and check closer to departure for J availability to open up?

I'm the same predicament and from what I was told by an agent a few minutes ago, AS's (no pun intended) international partner desk supervisor is going to escalate the phantom space issue and advised me to try again in a few days. She said the problem is on the international airline's side, not AS, most notoriously Cathay Pacific because they've not released the awards CX listed on AS. I don't know how to make sense of it, though. I've been trying to book since mid-December with no luck. If they've been getting many report of phantom space, they should have already reported it to their partners.

But I guess the only result of this escalation would be the removal of the phantom space, as opposed to suddenly having more availability?

I'd still take that over phantom space though. It's time consuming to click through the entire purchase process only for it to error out right at the end.

Well, BA showed PE availability on the flight I wanted if I searched for the legs individually and AS allowed me to book that (BA claimed zero availability if trying to search end to end). So I guess that’s something.

Indeed. More likely the removal of phantom spaces than having those bookable spaces.

I had a great deal of problems with this phantom space and my original reservation disappearing when I was trying to change it. I am glad to say that it is all sorted, When I get the "not possible to confirm with our partner" message I am finding that in 24-48 hours the reservation changes with Cathay from waitlisted to confirmed and then I get Alaska confirmation email. Some of the flights on AS are not showing on BA but still seem to be able to go through even after the error message. I think these phantoms are maybe not so phantom after all, just a software glitch that somehow AS are getting on top of.

I also can't stand the interface of BA/QF and gave up pretty quickly. I could be wrong but you might need to search segment by segment on those sites.
Personally, I would lock those dates in now in PE and hope J opens up later.

It was not stated in your previous post but I see now you are looking for 2 seats. Unfortunately, the date I found only had 1J.

It sounds like you already have FJ flights booked so unless you prefer CX PE to FJ J I would not bother to book CX PE and would just keep checking to see if CX J opens up.

BA's site does take extra steps so I would use QF first and BA to verify the individual segments (BA does not seem to show US-Aus routings on CX). The nice thing about QF is they have a calendar search and they do not show mixed cabin on the calendar results (so you don't waste time looking for end to end Business). An alternative is JAL's Cathay Pacific partner specific search although I am not sure that is any easier than BA to navigate.

QF has a really nice calendar search and searches the entire journey. BA seems not to search end to end from Australia to the US, at least on CX, so if you use BA for those searches you probably do need to search segment by segment (Australia-HKG and HKG-US).

Phantom. Looked as though I'd found biz all the way thru to KUL on CX. It was one day beyond what the award chart first shows, but it came up as I checked prior dats. Wouldn't ticket. Got a great 28 year agent at AS. He tried for half an hour thru all of his bells and whistles. No joy.