award availability (or lack of) on onepass
 

I know this topic has been addressed many times already but I thought I would share my experience this am with the elite desk. I called to see about award availability in business or first to BOM at the end of January returning on Feb 5th. I am a Gold member (downgraded from plt last year) and will make gold this year also. The first comment to emerge from the agent's mouth without even checking was that it would be highly unlikely. Nice way to start!!! I made sure to ask that she would check every available partner as there are many options now that CO is a skyteam member. I also said that I could leave out of PHX, LAX etc as I live in TUC and connections etc aren't always available (most notably Northwest as there is only one flight per day). I was on hold for 10 minutes after which she told that she found seats on NW out of PHX in coach. I told her that I was interested in C/F at which she rudely stated that I told her coach. I politely replied that she must have misheard me but she insisted that I had said otherwise.......anyways!!. I was then put on hold for another 10 minutes and was told that for 240,000 miles I could fly on NW with easy pass. I thought this was a lot of miles and then asked about purchasing an upgradeable fare on NW and use miles to which she replied that standard rewards are essentially unavailable at any time. I then suggested that perhaps they shouldn't even bother offering a reward for which there is no realistic chance to score a ticket. I asked again about other partners.....VS/AF/KLM/DL etc to which she quickly replied that there were no seats. I frankly doubt that she even checked. Score zero for continental- I have yet to obtain reward tickets with >400,000 miles. I realize that I am only calling two months in advance but I have also called in the past, for other tickets, at least 6 months in advance. Contrast this with Delta whom I called right after I hung up with CO--I have 290,000 miles and no status with them since 1999.
The agent was extremely nice and polite. I told her that I had tried CO to no avail. She immediately said that they had lots of options and she would she what she could come up with. Within 2 or 3 minutes she obtained a Frist class seat from LAX to BOM vis Kuala Lumber , ON THE EXACT DATES that I wanted. She also said that there was a possibility on AF and Alitalia. I grabbed the seats on MH. The whole process took less than 10 minutes. The agent was extremely helpful and polite. To note, I have obtained other rewards on Delta in the last 5 years without any problem and without any status ( 2 J tickets on Singapore to Bali, and 2 J to JNB). I know that often it is just plain luck but I have never had any luck on CO , despite status and have been very lucky with DL , despite no status. I guess that even though they are both Skyteam members, they obviously have different award inventory. Is this just my bad luck with CO??? Thanks for listening to my experience (and my long story!)

I have similar experience for award availability compared CO to Delta. I am also CO Gold and no status on Delta, but Delta is much easier to get partners' award seats while CO is quite difficult. However, I have no trouble to get CO's BF to Hawaii (from LAX) while it's very hard to get Delta's less attractive F to Hawaii.
My guess is CO is new to Skyteam and the agents are less familiar with Skyteam awards. OnePass still can't get me a F on Air France, but Delta could. It takes only 140,000 Skymiles to fly LAX- Taipei, either on China Airlines, Malaysian or Korean, while it will take 200,000 OnePass miles to fly F on Eva to Taipei. Co is weak on partner award compared to other airlines.

CLE-HNL 4 Standard F Seats......On DL
 

I know what your mean:


In April 2004 I started looking (every day) for 4 standard reward F tix from CLE-HNL r/t for the last week of March 2005. Nothing on CO. Zilch.
Granted, this is Easter week and, for many, spring break.

However, I found 4 STANDARD F seats CLE-ATL-HNL and HNL-ATL-CLE on DL.
(Using the DL website.) I grabbed them hoping the CO availability would open up and I would then pay the change fee.

I know DL F is not as nice as CO's BF.

Currently, there are 4 HNL-IAH standard F seats on CO on my return date but no standard F (or Y) IAH to CLE. Tried web and phone...no go.

Break it up a bit. If they say they can't get you LAX-BOM, ask them if they have LAX-KL-AMS or LAX-AF-CDG and find out what your problem segment(s) are. Then try to find a way to work around it. It's possible they have CDG-BOM, but nothing from LAX-CDG. But they may have SNA-IAH-CDG, who knows.

I have used many CO miles all at the standard level for biz class travel. Sometimes you have to spoonfeed ideas to the agent (e.g., not "please check every partner" but "did you check Delta? Air France? Alaska?").

Think also of the obscure partners that they may forget. I recently was looking for C class back from NRT on NW (outbound was fine), and they didn't have NRT-SFO on or around my date, but they did have NRT-PDX, so I booked NRT-NW-PDX-AS-OAK. The response I got was "Oh, good idea. I didn't know Alaska flew that route." :rolleyes:

So think of some of the unusual routes, airlines, or alternate airports, etc. that you can. Often the results you get is dependent on the agent's ability to search and be creative.

You have some good suggestions here and I will call back just to see if I can still snag something. Delta is holding my reservations until Dec 16th but I would rather burn my CO miles since I have a lot more. The problem today was that the agent seemed to be irritated at my asking for different routes etc. It was a quick response of "no seats available".Perhaps I should have just called back but I have this strange fear that I will get the same agent on the second call. Who knows how many agents they have working on the elite line for international travel.
who kn

There's quite a few Elite line agents, and there are also different shifts. I think the one you got was having a bad day.

If you're reward starts getting complex, call the int'l partner desk at 800-344-3333. Press the option for KLM (regardless of whether you're using KLM). These people are among the most knowledgeable reward folks at CO. The Elite line people are good, but these take the cake.

One item of concern, you say you're holding space with DL miles? It's possible that the seat(s) you're holding with DL miles are preventing you from being able to book them with CO miles. Remember with Biz or First Class rewards, there aren't that many seats to go around in the first place (often as few as 1 or 2 on a plane). So if you're holding something say on AF, with DL miles, and it's the last of the inventory, there's no way you'll be able to get them with CO miles unless they're first freed up. However, there is a risk that once you release them, they do not go back into inventory.