Unable to book seats on codeshare flights
 

I just booked an itinerary on aa.com which includes the AY-operated HEL-ORD.

Usually, when I want to change seats on such a flight, I call AA customer service and ask for the AY PNR and then change the seat on the website (or call the customer service when website does not work, which is often enough).

In this case, I called AY directly (because AA customer service is busy), and they claimed that since April this year it has not been possible to book seats on flights which involve codeshares because of some system upgrades that are going on.

Has anybody heard anything about this? Is there a workaround? Can't say I am very thrilled with the idea of being unable to book seats on the longhauls...

I faced similar issue last week. BA issued ticket, CX operated flight with AY code. I could not book seats on CX website (because it is AY flight). I could not book seats on AY website (because it is not AY operated).

Contacted Plat desk and they were able to assign me the seat I wanted. They gave the same reason of ongoing system upgrade for this issue.

Try calling AA again. If you can not get AA nor AY to book you a seat then it is indeed bad :(

As of April Finnair has no longer used a separate PNR for the codeshare flights. This is why the seat selection's been acting up.

I finally managed to contact AA and got my AY PNR. When I log in to the AY's reservation system, it claims that I cannot book seats before check-in on HEL-ORD because "this flight is not operated by AY"... Customer service is unable to help as well.

Has anybody had any success on booking AY seats through AA customer service? I might try my luck, but the queue was about 30 minutes this morning when I called them..

I had similar issue too. AY issued ticket, on AY flight number, but operated by CX.
Called AY CC and they said they can't assign me the seat and I have to call CX.
Just called CX and they were able to do the seat assignment in few seconds.

Shouldn't operating carrier be always able to book the seats even though the ticket is sold by other carrier?

Maybe u should try HUACA?
Just tell ur AY PNR and ask to get the seat assignment.

I had a similar experience flying BA/ Openskies booked through AA. In my case, the issue was that the operating carrier had not received the proper info from AA. I had to call BA customer service, get my ticket # (not PNR), and call AA CS with that info. Once that was done it took AA about 3 hours to correct on their end, after which I could select a seat.

Hope that helps.

Adding a data point of a BA issued ticket, all flights with BA numbers and 2 flights on the itinerary operated by AY.

I ran into the same issue about a month ago, called BA who said I needed to contact AY to get my seats assigned. I tried AY chat and the agent said they were unable to book seats for me at this time. I then called AY (USA number) and spoke to a very helpful agent who assigned me seats, confirmation email received in a matter of minutes and seats updated on both BA and AY site.

I would say HUACA because it definitely can be done by AY, might just take a few attempts.

Upcoming flight with AF ticket and AY operated flight. Seat selection not available before check in.

What do you mean by this? There are still separate PNRs for AA and AY.

Same here, but opposite solution
 

In my case, AY issued ticket on AY flight number but CX operated.
Unable to change seat in my booking. I mailed CX dk-office. They answered, Yes we can normally change your seat. But in this case AY has already assigned you specific seats. So, we (CX) can't do anything.

I called AY CC, after a minute or two the cc-staff was able to change my seat succesfully.
Don't know why AY assigned me some random seats in my initial booking, this seemed to be the reason why CX didn't want do undo the seat selection.
However, my AY-issued "Value" ticket books into N-class on the CX-flight. N fare isn't allowed to select seats at CX, so this might have something to do why they didn't want to change my seat.

After I got the seat selection solved with AY, I asked the staff what the normal procedure on codeshare flights is. The answer was, normally it is the operating carrier you should contact, however It still depends on case to case. In some cases it is the ticket issuer you should contact. Lesson learned? It is a fifty-sixty situation which carrier to try with first in these situations. :p^

What lkrt meant is that at least for those cases where both marketing and operating carrier uses Amadeus, there are no longer multiple, carrier specific reservation numbers.

In the past for a CX marketed, but AY, CX and KA operated itinerary, I had 3 separate PNRs to manage my bookings at each airline. Since April, AY updated their system and there is only one PNR, regardless of the number of carriers involved. This supposed to make things easier, since you as a customer would not have to jump through hoops and loops just to find the "right" PNR.

Of course, IRL, at least for now this just doesn't work. With the single PNR you in most cases (?) are not able to do seat selection on AY's site for flights operated by other carriers, nor can you use that PNR to log in to other carriers' site to manage your booking there...

So far this seems to be a great enhancement. :td: #Sarcasm

With AY and AA using different GDS, there is likely a separate PNR existing, but seems like that since this upgrade all codeshare flights are a bit messed up.

Indeed, the AY customer service claimed that everything was behind a single PNR after some unspecified "enhancement".

However, AA customer service still was able to provide me a separate AY PNR... I guess this is because the AA booking used SABRE instead of Amadeus.

Even with the AY PNR, I was unable to select seats.

It's always been that way for the CDG<->HEL codeshare - no news there.

You could try to use the AY PNR to preselect seat on the return flight maybe.

Here's one datapoint, as an AA Exec Plat I was able to change my AA codeshare flight (operated by Finnair) seat just by calling the AA Exec Plat contact center number. I did call the Finnair US number earlier today, but they just said that it was not possible for them to change the seat reservation even though they located the reservation based on my ticket number and gave me their PNR for the booking.

Go figure...

Most times, when an airline agent tells you "I'm sorry, Sir, we can't do it", you should interpret it as "I don't know how to do it, don't care how to learn, and you're wasting my time". It pays off to be persistent. :rolleyes: