incaroads

Hi folks - I'd like to transfer Amex MR points to AZ so I can book 2 business class seats in October 2020 (JFK-VCE and FCO-JFK), but I'm not confident that the seats I'm seeing on the website are actually available. The website shows widespread availability next fall with "2 seats left" (standard business fare) on the flights I want, but I've called the Albanian call center several times now to put the booking on hold, and all of the agents have said there's nothing available. I'm wondering if the website knows more than they do, but naturally I don't want to transfer MR until I know this isn't phantom space. The apparent abundance of seats in J does make me a little skeptical.

I've searched through a lot of the AZ threads here and elsewhere, and am not sure how to proceed. Thoughts, anyone? I created a MilleMiglia account about a week ago and transferred 1,000 MR into it, so the account should be considered active by now.

glemat

Based on my recent experience, trust the website and NOT the Albanian call center, which several years ago I will say was very helpful in booking an award ticket but recently they could not have been more wrong. Last July on the website I found two awards seats in June 2020 that worked for me: GOA-FCO-LAX. There were 3 available options, including a Friday late morning departure from Genoa to Rome, then the FCO-LAX leg the following Saturday morning. I called the call center to hold those while I transferred the Amex miles. I called 3 times. Each rep told me the flight I wanted, along with another found on the website, was not available. They only had one routing available that I wasn't interested in. One rep told me with great certainty that I could NOT stay overnight in Rome, and when asked why I was looking at it on the website as we spoke, she replied that she did not see that routing on her screen. Another rep, whose distinctive voice I remembered from when he helped me two years ago, gave me a v-e-r-y confident lecture--if I was less generous I might use the word arrogant-- how based on his years of experience only he know what was possible to book.

So after the 3rd try with the call center, with some trepidation, I just transferred the miles and booked the trip that I was told was impossible and it was ticketed.

One final thought: Before transferring your miles, call them first to verify that your account is in fact active. It should be by now, but if it hasn't been activated on their end, you'll get an error message when trying to complete your online booking, which doesn't explicitly say why it can't be completed. This happened to me when both my partner's account and mine had apparently been temporarily deactivated for lack of use. During one of my calls, they reactivated his since the miles were coming from his account, but I forgot to mention my own account. So while booking the ticket online, having put my Millemiglia # in the booking, it gave me a vague error message about a passenger. When I removed my own Millemiglia # from the booking, it went thru.

I hope your experience is as successful as mine. And yes, I know, Alitalia is in a tenuous position, to put it mildly. But my last trip LAX-FCO-LAX in biz 2 years ago was great, and I (somewhat cautiously) share Dav77's belief in Alitalia's survival..... for a while at least.

Dav77

if you can see the standard business available (normally there are only 2 available seats) it means you can book it with miles

you can do it directly on website

incaroads

Thanks for the input - we switched gears entirely and are going to Japan instead. We'll save Italy for another day! I had a feeling the Alitalia website was more reliable than the phone reps, but I just couldn't muster the confidence to transfer MR without at least being able to put the flights on hold.