Booking reward tickets on EY partners with Etihad Guest Miles
 

I know there is a thread for AA customers who are booking tickets on EY, but haven't seen anything for people using Etihad guest miles to book reward tickets on partner airlines.
I would love to hear from people who have successfully booked tickets through Etihad for travel on partner airlines using guest miles.

1) Which airline did you fly and when?
2) How easy was the booking process? Did you give specific instructions to booking agent or were they able to find what you needed?
3) Were you able to look up award availability on a website/ or did award availability on the airline you were traveling on's website match the availability the Etihad call centre gave you?
4)Did the cost of the ticket in miles,match what is quoted on the Etihad website?
5)Any other useful info?!

I tried to book a domestic one way ticket on AA last summer and talked to numerous call centre agents, none if whom seemed sure of the procedure and then when one agent did seem to try could not see any availability at all for random dates as far as a year in advance!

Would love to hear other peoples ( hopefully successful) experiences!

I called the Etihad Hotline in Bangkok to book am award ticket with fly be to the UK) from str/Germany).
It took them quite a while. I guess I was on hold for 2x15minutes. However, they managed to offered me the requested flights...

I am interested in booking on Oman Air so also interested in this.

Last year
 

I tryed to book using EY Guest last year on AA, but after many attempts, it was never doable.

Things may have changed now, but if you want more insight, you can read this thread

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/etiha...mption-aa.html

Hi Sammy, I think yours was the thread I was looking for and had read before. It seems only two responders to your thread were able to book with EY miles. Your original post in your thread is the same frustrating position I was in!! :mad::mad::mad:

Hi there,

We kindly advise you to check out Etihad Guest Website for more details about redeeming miles for a reward ticket. Or you can contact our reservation team in your location. All the contact details can be found in Etihad.com.

Thank you for writing to us. *JS

I am interested in booking on Oman Air so also interested in this.

Unlikely.

About a year ago, I got an agent from Etihad who had the time and patience to work with me. We were booking to BKK from Oman, but I was using EY miles. After a few dates where I was flexible, I asked him to try 8 months out, 10 months out. Not one seat. Then we tried KL. Not one seat. I asked about success and he said not usually, if ever. He said inventory is not viewable from OmanAir, so they have to check date by date. Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy. Yet another hollow 'perk' from EY.

I have a question about Guest Miles redemptions on their partner ANA.

On their website under ANA redemptions, it says, "Mileage values in the table are for one way journeys only. Return journeys will be double of the values of one way."

This leads me to believe that one-ways and roundtrips are acceptable. However, I recall the old ANA chart only allowing roundtrips.

For comparison, the AA chart explicitly says, "One way tickets are permitted."

So, I can't figure out if the ANA award chart is straight-forward or conceiving.

Anyone have an answer?

Anyone had any luck with Oman Air or is it still almost impossible (in Economy). I have seen a few threads talking about success in Business but nothing in Economy!

my understanding is that people are having difficult, but not impossible times booking on Oman Air. Certainly much better experiences than the post above from 2 years ago, which i assume you are referencing.

I actually need to book 3, one way Oman Air tickets for Feb with EY miles...just haven't done it yet. The consensus seems to be that you should be able to find an agent to help now, but you may have to call back a couple times to find a capable one.

Is there a good way to search award availability beforehand?

Wanted to book a redemption on jet airways from Mumbai to Dubai and after being on the phone for almost 35 mins the agent comes back with "JET doesnt fly from Mumbai to Dubai!!" and after explaining to the agent that jet has 6 or 7 flights a day she goes back to her "SUPERVISOR" who then assures me that jet doesnt fly on this sector. How these morons work for the airline is beyond me and what is more shocking is they actually believe that the customer is an idiot and they can feed them with all sorts of bullshi_!

Once I got an agent who insisted that Virgin Australia is NOT a partner airline and 'assured' me that redemptions are not possible. He went to say that the information on the website cannot be trusted because it may be out of date. I got the sense he was just taking his time on the call to show that he's working and didn't want to bother with attending to annoying client enquiries.

After cornering him and claiming that I will be lodging a complaint against this misinformation, he went to check and came back to say, yes VA is a partner but that particular route is not flown by VA but by their partner airline which was not a partner with EY- that's despite him pointing out there were redemption seats available (it was a VA flight by the way) but not bookable because Virgin Australia Regional Airlines was NOT a partner.

I asked him to try and book it to see whether it gets accepted not, he said he did try and the system said no. I asked him to do a long sell, he was puzzled as to how I was familiar with such a term before saying he is not allowed to do it.

The route was a simple CBR-SYD btw.

Argh. The days of frustration with EY guest are over for me anyhow, almost..

What's a long sell?

To manually force a reservation by specifying the date, flight, fare bucket and number of pax, despite the inventory in that fare bucket showing nil.

It's only effective when there's actual inventory but a bug/glitch is causing the inventory to show differently.

For example, once (back when VA/DJ used the old res system, and VS still flew to SYD) I booked HKG-SYD on VS after having verified availability through VS own website, but DJ's agent insisted they could not see availability. When they tried the long sell, the response came back as confirmed to their amazement.

The inventory need not to be an award one. I once got a confirmed paid fare on EWR-MAD with UA despite a zeroed out flight on the standalone sector (UA had inventory open for thorough itineraries e.g. XXX-EWR-MAD-YYY).