Split booking and POUG
 

We have a booking for a return flight to DUB. The booking is for 2 people.

A POUG is currently offered on both legs. I would like to take advantage for TP related reasons but we don’t want to buy an upgrade for both of us.

Do you know if splitting the booking would impact on the POUG currently offered? I ask because I know that POUGs are quite “fragile” when it comes to complex bookings.

Yes, it has a negative impact, unless something has changed recently.

The act of splitting the booking tends to take you off Self Serve channel which in turn seems to switch off POUGs. If you accept a POUG, split, and then try to cancel the unwanted POUG then I think it's non refundable, there isn't an extra 24 hour cooling off for that (I believe, please someone correct me). So if this was ever in contention, it's best in these circumstances to make 2 bookings.

Thanks C-W-S!

I had a similar situation, about which I asked in the POUG thread here and here. There were some helpful replies there.

However, the ultimate outcome was inconclusive for your actual question: By the time that I'd got agreement from the passengers to have another go (long lines of communication), the POUG had actually disappeared. So I had to split the booking and do a fares rules upgrade on one booking. However, a number of days later, the non-upgraded booking showed a POUG offer again for the original flight.

The other lesson learned from that experience was that unlike what I regularly see on long-haul flights, short-haul availability can be pretty binary. My backup plan had been to do a fare rules booking from O to I in one direction. However, the flight (and others across a number of days) went straight from I9 to I0 without anything in between. Watching availability displays for a while afterwards showed this behaviour repeated on other flights. So I actually had to do a fare rules upgrade from V to R in the other direction instead.

If you split your booking and end up having to think about doing a fare rules upgrade, this is something that you might want to bear in mind.

Very interesting, thank you!

It seems that there is little risk in splitting the booking and hoping that the POUG offer will appear again after a few days. C-W-S was under the impression that it wouldn't be possible but your experience would suggest it is.

When splitting the booking into different PNRs, would I have to ask to link them for seat assignment purposes, i.e. to be able to choose a seat for the non GCH?

Indeed my assumption is once out of self serve, you stay out, but Globaliser's experience suggests otherwise. For the seat selection, I think the answer is clearer since TCP only applies in the same cabin, so it won't work if in different cabins and a split booking.The logic being to allow the GCH the ability to have their companion sat near them, as opposed to donating GCH seating privileges to other travellers.

In my case, it was the Gold who upgraded. Before doing that, I made sure that the Blue was sitting in the better seat of the already-allocated economy pair, and AFAIK that pre-allocation was never cancelled or moved (although it would have cost money to move the Blue to another seat).

On the non-upgraded half, seats together had already been pre-allocated for both pax pre-split. There was a curtain shift post-split, and both the Gold and the Blue were moved, albeit into different rows. When splitting the booking, I had asked the agent to TCP the bookings. However, it was entirely as expected that the TCP note would not have been read or noticed by the machinery that automatically moved both pax on this sector. It would have cost money to move the Blue via MMB. If necessary, I could have called again to get the two pax seated together for free - but as it was actually better to move the Gold to sit next to the Blue, there was no need to trouble seating with a request.

If you're going to be in different cabins on both sectors, then the TCP seat allocation privilege won't apply, as c-w-s says. But my experience suggests that before splitting the booking, you should pre-allocate a decent seat for the other passenger, and then hope for the best after the split.