SkyMiles Award Problem Booking Single VN Flight
 

Good Day Everyone!

I'm hoping you may be able to assist or point me in the right direction. I've been working tirelessly for the past several months on planning a once in a lifetime trip to Asia. My initial call to Delta SkyMiles reservations was quite helpful and the agent placed a hold on a reservation. However, when I called back to ticket the reservation, things went a bit sour because the agent had me scheduled on a Korean Airlines flight during a blackout period.

After much searching, we were able to identify a routing LAS-LAX-NRT-TPE-HAN. A few months later, a schedule change resulted in what would have been a misconnect at LAX. I contacted Delta for rebooking which now involves LAS-SEA-NRT-TPE-HAN.

In an effort to reduce the enormous amount of travel time, I'm trying to book a seat on a non-stop flight from NRT-HAN. This would eliminate the need to travel to TPE..saving me over 4 hours of flying. The problem is, however, that Delta Airlines Reservations are not seeing any seats available on the Vietnam Airlines nonstop.

I contacted Vietnam Airlines and they indicate there are plenty of seats in the J booking class. I do realize that there are only a limited number of seats available for SkyMiles use. However, Vietnam Airlines was quite helpful and advised me they would approve the booking if Delta would send over a request for it. Furthermore, checks on KLM's and other awards sites shows the availability.

I contacted Reservations again to see if they would be willing to assist. While they did "waitlist" me for the flight, that request was never transmitted to Vietnam Airlines. Following up today, I was advised that this request would not be sent over to Vietnam Airlines for approval because these seat availability were actually controlled by Delta Corporate.

Furthermore, the supervisor told me that they are unable to tell me if there had ever been any seats available or this may be a market that Delta doesn't allow SkyMiles reservations. She said that they had no way of contacting Corporate Revenue Management to look in to this.

Is there anyone that can help?

Welcome to FT!

If you can see the VN seat on airfrance.us, it's available with SkyMiles. Sounds like you've run into agents making things up as they go along. I'd try calling again (don't tell them everything else you've been through) and ask them to try long selling the award and waiting for it to come back confirmed.

MT..Thanks for the reply!

I've spoken with SEVERAL agents and even the Executive Office support. They all give the same story. Unfortunately, my reservation has several pages of notes on it..haha..or so I'm told.

I did ask them to long-sell it the last time I called. No such luck.

Just frustrating that seats are available..VN is willing to approve a request, but cannot get to the right person at Delta to help.

When are you traveling?

Do you have DL status? Not that it should matter, but it certainly impacts the quality of the agents and how far they're willing to go for you.

I'd be very curious what you'd find out if you called in and started trying to ticket a totally separate reservation NRT-HAN (make it r/t, I guess) using the segment you're trying to get. If that came up as available, then clearly they need to do something different to put the segment in your existing reservation. If it doesn't come up as available even then, I'm not sure what's going on. DL doesn't have blackout dates for VN that I've ever seen, and other than weird use of blackout dates on KE, I've not seen anything concretely equivalent to *net blocking by DL. (Of course, checking inventory on a bunch of DL partners is very difficult, so it'd be hard to prove it's happening.)

Since the DL agents keep not being able to give a real, concrete reason why they won't let you have the seat, have you tried calling DL and then conferencing in VN to get them talking to each other? I don't know that it would necessarily do any good, but it might be worth a try.

Here is the flight in question..

VN311 27DEC NRT-HAN (J)

Wandering Aramean reports four seats available in that bucket on that flight on that date. Seems DL is really, really trying to keep you from redeeming for that flight for some reason. The FB engine also would let me book four seats on that flight in business.

I'm just at a loss. =( Don't know what else to do. I'm not trying to be difficult, but sure DL is tired of me calling.

VN has offered a conference call, but all DL says is "our computers show no availability".

You know, I've been having this same problem trying to change award flights on Alitalia. For some reason they weren't long-selling the award correctly.

I got fed up yesterday and created a new itinerary online, then called to have them add the Alitalia segments in.15 minutes to accomplish something that even the manual reissue desk hadn't been able to figure out.

Once everything was confirmed I had the agent cancel the old itinerary completely - don't know if it will help you, but might be worth a shot.

There's supposed to be a special SkyTeam desk. I don't know how you get connected to them, given the current mess, but it seems like it'd be worth trying to ask for the SkyTeam desk. The other thing might be asking VN if they can call DL for you. Seems like it'd be hard for DL to refuse a call from a partner airline, even if it is about one of their own members.

Since VN isn't bookable on DL.dumb, that's probably not going to work. The only way it might be is if you tried calling in and starting a new reservation, getting them to see the inventory, and the convincing them to add it to your booking.

Right, that's basically what I was saying. My recent experience has been that they have an EXTRA difficult time *changing* partner awards as opposed to issuing them in the first place. So whether OP starts a new reservation online (for the DL segments) or tries calling in it would be the same strategy. May or may not help.