I dunno, but I've seen some of the cryptic stuff that CO agents have to enter to get you on an upgrade list, I could imagine this is tough as well.

In the past (SkyTeam days), many CO agents were reluctant to do it -- not sure if it was because they didn't know how to, or if they didn't think they were supposed to.

Didn't CoInsider say there were issues with LX award redemption (he's been quiet of late)? Odd Swiss is so far OUT of the *A being owned by LH and all, but that seems the case.

Is CO showing any availability for LH or LX on any date? Sounds like OP only checked May and certain destinations If so, I would imagine that some sort of blocking is taking place.

I had an agent yesterday unable to find any of the UA and US flights that were showing up on the website. I needed an agent rather than booking online, as it was a change to an award reservation, and as is the case 50% of the time, "Continental.com is unable to make changes to this reservation...". Miles came from a non-Plat family member so cancel-and-rebook wasn't an option.

Plat agent transferred me to web support. That agent still couldn't see the availability (and it was a simple 1-conx DEN-UA_or_US_hub-RDU) that was coming up for new reservations. However she did proactively say "let me see if I can find it segment-by-segment" and then did a manual sell of the seat, which of course was confirmed immediately.

Upside: CO showed they are willing to do manual sells.

Downside: pretty clear that the agents aren't seeing the same things that continental.com sees, which is bizarre. Also the first agent was touchy when I asked her to look by segment with the "I've been here for years and I know how to make a reservation" defensive stuff.

Said experience means nothing if your airline just changed alliances 3 weeks ago, has a different award interchange booking system, and probably doesn't have all the interfaces done yet.

I remember posts a few years ago about how CO agents rarely could find available partner award flights, but if you force-fed them the specific flights then they might be able to find them, with extra effort. It could be that CO's SHARES system or whatever the agents use to interface to the award system is the problem, and has been for years. Rather than it being Starnet specific.

It's amusing that continental.com will now show award routings including Air China (CA) that no other *A airline except CA'S shows (not even ANA's), but if I try to find an award to destinations like Bangkok, or Gainesville FL, it throws the "Continental and/or its partners serve this destination but do not offer a fare between them."

I think they are.....I have booked 2 flights recently in F where it showed ZERO availability online.

All I had to do was call.

If they booked flights showing not available, that is not starnet blocking :)

Seriously. There are IT integration issues. And there are agent training issues. And sure, that's Continental's "fault" -- but they're doing a pretty good job all-in-all so far IMHO.

This is not my experience to date, I have booked two award ticket, one far more complicated than the other and all CO agents have been on top of their game and willing to work with me to book the tickets.

If I saw availability on the ANA tool, CO saw the same availibily and in one instance, the agent saw availibity that I did not.

I am not sure what is at play here, but it has not been my experience.

Dan

Cryptic? I suppose since it isn't in particularly plain language. But it really isn't all that complicated:

My experience has been the same as yours.


As a customer, I'd ask the agent to try long-selling the ticket at this point if they insist that they aren't seeing it in their system. If that comes back as unavailable then there are possibly shenanigans going on.

The suggestion that CO controls the technology so if it isn't working then they are willfully blocking things is an interesting one. I think that they have made the technology VERY functional in a very short amount of time and that it continues to improve on a pretty speedy pace. I'm willing to give them a bit more than three weeks of live systems before passing judgment in the negative.

I was about to say this.

It's inappropriate to jump to the conclusion of blocking. CO has admitted there are issues with booking LX, and for the record, CO isn't the only carrier that has these issues.

If it's so important for the OP to have a booking, use LH or some other star carrier. But for the majority to conclude there is blocking in place is out of place and misleading to others. Quite frankly, in the few weeks of being in *A, i've found better availability than the ANA tool has been showing.

Agreed. Any migration of this magnitude will have a number of issues creep up and will take time to iron out. We need to give CO credit for doing a great job thus far and be a bit patient.

So far I have had very good luck. But yes you do have to call, the online award calendar is missing an awful lot. I think it will take months perhaps even years to have full integration with IT. It's very complicated, and as I recall skyteam and Continental were only just barely beginning to get it together at the end. Even then frequently I would find flights available on NWA.com, that didn't show up on continental.com... but I would call the agent and there was no issue booking those flights. If you want to see a totally useless award calendar go visit delta.com sometime.

CO.com is already significantly better for *A than it ever was for ST partner inventory. I expect that it will be still a few more months before things are very stable and functional but I doubt that it'll take years. The ability to tie into StarNet rather than negotiating individual bilateral IT deals with each carrier should help tremendously.

There are still going to be plenty of scenarios where complicated routings won't show online no matter what; even the "gold standard" ANA tool can barely handle connections. But many single and double connect options are already there.

My issue with co.com is not so much a *A issue, rather that they seem to keep tweaking it and changing how it behaves. It lacks credibility, IMO, because it's shown me some weird stuff that shouldn't be possible.

Just in the last weeks, it's shown me standalone US segments in EasyPass only (then it will show them properly; then it will go back to EasyPass a few days later); potentailly illegal connections through other countries (AUA-EWR-YYZ-BOS); and so on.

We saw similar such behavior back in the SkyTeam days -- all of a sudden no AF segments would show. Then AF segments would show. Then only AF segments as part of connections, but not the same flight if requested standalone. Or domestic flights with Canada connections.

I think the appeal of ANA is that it's solid (what do you expect, it's Japanese!). It may not think of every connection in the book, and if the link is down to a carrier, it will say so (happens at times with UA or OZ, I've seen).

So I use co.com for CO metal searches with Elite status logged in; ANA for partner metal or non-Elite CO searches, and phone reps to book. It's a bit of effort to figure out the connection possibilities that ANA won't show because they're just a hair inefficient (e.g., SFO-UA-LAX-TG-BKK), but in the end, that's worked well for me.

No. Continental is not blocking partner seats a la UA style.

LX has it's own system and their still going through the growing pains of integrating into star (FWIW BD was not able to book LX award inventory either earlier today, but I digress.)

Also I've found all the agents I've dealt with to be on the ball when it comes to booking awards across multiple star and non-star partners and I suspect there's some other factor(s) at work here then poor agent training or blocking.^ Well said.