Incorrect Ticketing
 

First ever LifeMiles booking. I picked the 26th October and received a confirmation email as such. However, an hour later it was ticketed on the 27th.

Currently on a 30-minute and counting call to the US call centre who is is conference with a Spanish-speaking lady who is liaising with Lifemiles and / or the ticketing department.

It was too much to expect it to be ticketed perfectly in the first instance wasn't it :D

Miles to be refunded today (not holding my breath), cash / taxes to be refunded within ten days (I may book a slight loss / gain on the FX)

Jeez, never heard of that happening. It must surely mean that the ticketing agent manually overrode what was in the system?

Whatever next?! :eek:

Or a "simple" IT problem.... timezones/dates are always difficult :-).

Must have been some sort of glitch.....Booked an award just now and 30 seconds later the PNR was available and I could choose a seat with the airline. All on the day I intended :-).

Of course a day and a half later my miles aren't refunded...

This just happened to me, booked a TP flight for 21/12, received confirmation e-mail for 21/12, checked checkmytrip.com and it says: 23/12 !!

Some more details:
The flight on 21/12 had only 1 seat available in business on ANA (which is gone now though clearly not booked for me)
The flight had no availability on 22/12
The flight had availability on 23/12

My wild theory:
I was playing around a bit with potential connecting flights (and some LH married segments shenanigans) and even went one page beyond the page where you choose the itinerary. I assume by doing this, I already blocked the only available seat in the CRS. Then I was going back and forth and so on until I finally booked the flight which showed still available on the frontend. My wild guess is that it was not available anymore on the CRS since one of my other attempts already blocked it. So I should have gotten an error message saying that availability has gone. (Given my experience on delta.com where this happens all the time when only one seat is available and I go back and forth, I would have understood why this happens. On delta.com the seat is only released again a few hours later.)
Of course, it may have also been that it was not available anymore on the CRS for other reasons. In any case, a healthy system would terminate my booking attempt at this point with some error message.

Instead it seems that the system looked for the next available day on the CRS, with 22/12 not being available it chose 23/12 for me while still confirming 21/12 to me on the screen during payment and by e-mail. Of course, whenever you DON'T need it, it was ticketed within 5 minutes... Thank you very much, now I have to chase the cancellation/refund.

So always check check check...

I wonder if LM would ever be in a position to understand and correct this mal-function?

MSS?
 

Recently booked a Star Alliance Award via the Lifemiles online site.

Issued within 24 hours, considering past experience with LM which required a week of calls and emails, pleasantly surprised.

Noticed however that for female passengers on the booking, LM ticketed passengers as (Last Name)/(First Name)MSS

I'm pretty sure MSS is the (misspelled) title, especially since the drop down list when booking a ticket allows you to select MR/MRS/MSS but it appears on checkmytrip as part of the name.

Anyone has a similar experience of incorrect ticketing? And if so was travel a problem? (Have sent LM an email but hope to avoid long phone calls and re-issues if we're a-okay for flight)

No call to Lifemiles is something I would ever classify as a pleasant experience. I speak pretty fluent Spanish, so I can at least speak directly to their call center without the eternal hold I have often experienced when trying to connect to an English speaker. Even in their native language, however, the challenge of what they promise vs. what really happens continues to exist.

IME, if I must call, I must call at least twice. Often more. The problems eventually get resolved, but it's a lot of work.

And people complain about United... ;)

I wouldn't worry about it - I believe up to three letters can be misspelled. I've had something similar happen several times and never had an issue. You can call the operating airline and ask them to note in the PNR that MSS is the title.

That is correct - specifically for MSS, it appends that title to the name.

Also, if you delve into the reservations from the airline point of view (i know it occurs on TG and NH at the very least), passengers with the title MSS are listed as MALE, not Female. Might be some chuckling at check-in counters, but not a big issue overall.

If you still want to avoid all that - just use MRS. Maybe not practical for a 13 year old girl though :) - but at least with MRS it works properly, i.e it doesn't append itself to your first name, nor does it give you a sex change.

Thank you for all responses! Appreciate the ideas and reassurances. I'll drop BR and SQ a line to inform them about the issue but will avoid the Lifemiles call.

Data Point: SQ sees MSS as the title so that's a good thing.

Completely agree that calling them is an exercise in futility, the last time we tried we pretty much spent a week doing call-centre roulette which did give a high probability that an agent was someone we spoke to before (I still have a list of more than 10 agent names)

Will keep in mind how all the ladies should go by Mrs the next time we do a booking with them (:

As an aside, some airlines (used to?) add Master as a title for infant boys. Must be an old IATA holdover. My son still gets master added to his name on any AA reservation years later.

He acts like one so perfectly appropriate.

I've always travelled as Silver/Chrismstr before I turned 12, and it wasn't that long ago.

The exact same thing happened to both females in my travel party. Got Mss as middle name on checkmytrip and lufthansa. Did you already travel? If so, did you encounter any problems?


Tommy