Ghost Availiablity with IB
 

Hello,
Ive been looking at a good fair Ex-Spain to the East Coast over the last few days.
Tried to book online and was told fare didn't exist. Tried a number of different flight combos and days, all the same. Message was to call Reservations.

Firstly the rep couldn't find the flights from US and said there was no BE fares.
Then when I explained I could find it on the Spanish site, she found it but said the quote was *each person* not the total, as displayed. (After a half hour she found the bit saying "Total price for all passengers and apologised for the confusion".

She then put me on hold for 35mins to speak to the "web team", then came back and said it wasn't an "error" just the fare wasn't available anymore - suggesting I wasn't fast enough? When I said the fare is there for a number of days, over a number of fligths, I went on hold again and she said it was an issue with the IB codeshare and it should be fixed and updated in around 10mins.

8 hours later, the fares are still there...

Worth another call? Or wasting my time? The fare appears on Google Flights, but not ITA

Are you calling American or Iberia?

If American , why ?

Might get better answers in the Iberia forum.

I'm calling American as the fare shows on their website. The itinerary is IB-AA-AA, AA-AA-IB. Both IB flights are AA codeshares.

Stale inventory.

As hard as it is to believe, given AA's woeful IT, IB is much, much worse. Combining the two, there's some positively ancient integrations running between the two systems, leading to fun issues like this.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...b1f399b1ad.png
AA and IB's dev shop

So what's best here. Just wait til it updates? (It's been showing for 5 days?) Book through BA at the higher rate? Fly DL?

Tried the UK site and it seems I *can* purchase the fare, albeit in GBP but same price...

Worth another phone call? Or bite the bullet can book?

Why book the codeshare? More miles? Cheaper?

You can book IB direct and credit the miles to AA. Direct always better in case of IRROPS.

I can't get the fare through IBeria. I can only get it through the AA site.
IB says the route doesnt work?!

Experienced this recently with a bunch of BA flights. Gave up and booked a more expensive routing unfortunately.

I'm running into this issue with a CLT-MAD-VCE r/t booking. AA shows all the legs, with pricing, but when I try to book it I get an error "some flights no longer available." I called the EP desk and they couldn't navigate it either - said the problem is with the MAD-VCE legs on Iberia. I have tried on and off for a few weeks to get it handled, but nothing has changed.

My primary goal is to make sure I can use a SWU or miles to upgrade the transatlantic leg for sleeping, so I think I need to book on AA for that leg. If I buy the whole trip on Iberia, even with my AA account attached to it, I am not going to be able to upgrade that, correct?

I can buy the MAD-VCE legs on Iberia's website without an issue, so I can just buy CLT-MAD on AA, but I'm reluctant to break the trip up. My other alternative is to go through LHR, and honestly I'd rather just break up the trip on my own rather than deal with Heathrow again.

Any other suggestions anyone has? Thank you!

That is correct, you must book via AA in order to use SWU's.

When you call, make sure the agent is trying to book the MAD-VCE-MAD legs as the IB prime flight number, as it could be an issue with the AA codeshare flight numbers (they might already be doing this but just double check). You could also try to piece it together this way using Google Flights, do a multi-city search for CLT-MAD, MAD-VCE, VCE-MAD, MAD-CLT, and see if you can get it to work that way.