Traveloguy

Fortunately this is one area where OW shines. The fare class seen on the ticket is the fare class which credits. I seem to recall this is also the process followed by most ST carriers.

Overall it's my biggest gripe about *A as it does appear that carriers manipulate the system to their advantage and you have absolutely no recourse should there be any issues when crediting to your preferred FFP.

NickB

Both ST and OW operate on the principle that it is the marketing carrier that determines how much you earn (with some limited exceptions), which is both more transparent and more sensible imo. The difficulties with *A stem from the operating carrier principle, which leads to a need for class mapping which does not exist in either OW or ST.

lhr baby

Can you explain how you came by this information because there is nothing on an SN boarding pass that gives clear information? I've done two trips recently both booked as BD tickets. One of them was in BD 'B' class and earned 1.5x miles so must have been presumably either SN 'B' or 'Y' class according to the BD earling table. However, the second one was in BD 'K' class and gave 1x miles and so could have been any of 'M', 'H', 'K', 'Q', 'V', 'W' or 'U'. In both cases my boarding pass shows class 'Y' which is generically indicating the economy cabin and also in both cases I had a B-Flex Economy+ ticket.

My question is given this how do you know the class? It is not clear from the boarding card for SN as far as I can make out. By the way this is nothing to do with the recent bonus point promotion on SN - I'm talking different base miles here. I'm not questioning your conclusion. This isn't meant to be an impertinent question, but I would genuinely like to know how you worked out the class given that the booking class isn't clear from the boarding card. SN are not the only airline that does this - there are several that sometimes (maybe always) just show the generic cabin on the boarding pass, which is unrelated to the booking class.

BA6501

With the updated DC members area layout, you will see the flight credit:
-you booked under BD5435 in K class
-it will display for the flight: SN2102 in H class.

This is how we can see which class on the marketing airline maps into which class on the operating airline.

lhr baby

OK I can see the logic in your deduction but in my case I'm showing

BRU to BHX on SN-02047 in Y

which is what the boarding pass says and this is for both flights even though they earned different base miles.

BA6501

My statement shows:

19-Mar-2010 BRU BRU to LHR on SN-02101 in H - 600 600
19-Mar-2010 BRU Bonus: BRU to LHR on SN-02101 in H - 750 0

So I don't understand why yours is somewhat different, as you have the same earning class for multiple flights on same route, but different miles...?

lhr baby

Exactly, but its not a posting error as the BD class was different in the two cases (and indeed the price paid for the tickets was quite different too). Hence my point is that I'm not sure this is 100% reliable. My suggestion would be that when people post a class conversion they complete an extra step and check to see if the points are consistent with the BD earning page then post accordingly. So in your case you would post

BD/K > SN/H (LHR-GLA)

and in my case I would post

BD/B > SN/Y (BRU-BHX)

but I would NOT post

BD/K > SN/Y (BRU-BHX) because the miles did not correspond to SN 'Y' class.

BristolTraveller

I think ITA can give you a hint, can't it?

For instance, here's edited highlights of a contrived BRS(SN)BRU(CO)EWR flight, from ITA.

So the whole itinerary is booked using a SLXNCGB0 CO fare - which is their lowest discount economy fare.

However, look at the individual flights:

This looks to me like it's (correctly) booked into S class on the CO operated flights, but booked into W class on the SN operated (by BD!) flights.

Now, unfortunately, I recently had a run in with CO on this route, when trying to book BRS-EWR on a day of the week when CO77 (the direct flight) was having a little winter lie-down, which forced me to take aforementioned contrived route. I was forcing a booking in B-class, which wouldn't book because the CO told me that BRS(SN)BRU booked into V class, which was showing V0. (It didn't book into B - I had a whinge on the LH board that I thought certain fare classes were meant to be consistent across *A, as opposed to SN doing their own sweet thing).

Back to ITA.

So this is still showing booking into W, even though (back in January) CO told me they needed to find avails in V. Maybe they changed the cross-booking class? (I think W is even more restrictive than V on SN?).

Is it worth trying a bunch of bookings in ITA, and see what they come up as. You can use the /f bc=XXX.YYY.ZZZ syntax in the search to force particular booking classes.

NickB

I agree that ITA gives a hint, but it is not a foolproof and reliable method. it cannot be ruled out that you could end up with unpleasant surprises.

lhr baby

I agree in some cases you can deduce fare classes from ITA. This works well when the BD and codeshare fares are quite similar. For example in the case we have been discussing for Thursday and Friday next week:

Out on SN2050 and back on SN2039 costs £385 and gives
1 adult in booking code K, covered by fare KRTFLEX

The BD equivalent for BD5350 and BD5339 back costs £380 and gives
1 adult in booking code M, covered by fare MRTFLEX

Its therefore probably reasonable to assume

BD/M > SN/K (BHX-BRU)

However, consider an option where there is a big discrepancy in fares e.g. LHR-IAD going out tomorrow and back on Wednesday

On the outward segment the cheapest flight on BD4469 is in booking code C, covered by fare C2GB, even though the return on BD4462 is in booking code M, covered by fare M2.

However, if you choose UA919 out and UA922 back, which are the same flights but much lower price, you get booking code M in both directions covered by the fare M12.

Now of course I fully accept that you'd have to be very silly to think the BD C-class flight mapped to M when quite obviously one ticket is in business class and the other in economy but I chose this example very specifically to illustrate a point.

The codeshare classes are allocated in blocks. Just because one airline has some blocks in a given bucket left doesn't mean the other airline will allocate the same bucket. You can't therefore just assume that the lowest price ticket offered by two different selling carriers on ITA will map to each other. You can quite often get tickets £40-£50 apart on LH or SK codeshares and who can say if the cheapest available fare buckets correspond or not from what ITA says - I know for a fact that in some cases they don't.

In your Continental case the ITA method will probably work because you have two fares covering four flights and you can see the individual classes for the individual flights. However, sometimes the first letter of the fare isn't the booking class at all and in other cases this sort of routing would be covered by four fares so you wouldn't gather any mapping information (and this is always potentially unreliable for a straight A-B as my rather extreme example above shows).

PS: Sorry NickB - I was busy typing my long reply whilst you were posting a much more concise one.

cfischer

Ac/s > lx/t (zrh-gva) 01/2011
ac/s > ua/v (yul-bos) 01/2011

cfischer

Ua/t > ac/l (bos-yow) 04/2010

EsherFlyer

LX/Q > SQ/W (SIN-ZRH) 4/2010

BTW, it took me a little while to find this thread even though I knew it existed. Can we get a link to it from near the bottom of 'The Programme Basics' sticky where the 'operating carrier' rules are described?

GoldCircle

Certainly. All done for you.

EsherFlyer

Many thanks ^