Hi,

I came close to booking 2 lifemiles tickets on LX for my parents this morning. I went so far as to input the credit card information, but did not hit "purchase." I decided to do more research.

After doing more research and coming back to the Lifemiles site, the same tickets are marked as unavailable, even though they are still available on United. I tried clearing my cookies and logging out and back in, but this made no difference.

Does anybody know what might be causing this, or when it might go away?

Thanks in advance.

Give it 24-48 hours. LM can sometimes ‘hold’ seats and sometimes this works in our favour if there is an IT error but the system manages to create a PNR anyway. In these cases we can ring to retrieve the PNR and pay manually.

If you enter the passenger details and go to the next step a PNR is created and the seats are taken. If you wrote down/have the pnr you might be able to call LM and pay for the reservation over the phone. Otherwise you may have to wait 72 hours and hope the seats come back

Apologies to bump an old thread, just wanted to drop a datapoint in case anyone else runs into this issue of PNRs being "held" at checkout.

I booked an ANA award with LifeMiles and ran into this exact issue (2 seats freed up, started checkout process with one pax instead of two, when I went back to re-do it one ticket was "gone"). I had noticed at the time that lifemiles already gave me a PNR even before completing checkout/payment (which funnily enough works on ana.com). Hoping that the first seat would become available again, but wanting to secure my chances, I booked the first pax as a single booking and waited for the second seat to become available again.

The "temporary" ANA PNR created during checkout expired and released the seat almost exactly 1 hour after getting to the final checkout page. So if you've accidentally "locked" an ANA award, I would suggest waiting one hour. Alternatively try calling LifeMiles but I didn't manage to do this in time. Anyway, 25 USD poorer now that I had booked two separate awards, but lesson learned.

Don't know if this applies to other bookings etc. Through some experimentation I could confirm that this checkout process completely removes the seat from availability (other award sites can't find it either while it's "locked").

My experience when booking domestic tickets in CO (not award tickets) and having payment issues with my credit card leading to payment being rejected and ticket not issued, is that an (unticketed) PNR will be created and stay "alive" for several hours afterwards. If you note the PNR (shown on the screen) and call AV to pay for the reservation (quoting the PNR created when trying to pay online), ticket can be issued this way.

What do we need to provide to avianca to retrieve the PNR? Their customer service people barely speak any English. It�s so difficult to communicate with them

how did you find the PNR that lifemiles created for you? I�m in the same situation but different airline.

You can see it in the URL or it might even be shown to you on the screen when the payment fails (I'm talking about revenue AV tickets here, not LM awards).