intuition

I used Finnair booking engine and found at least 3 seats in J for a certain trip/date. Called to make a junior award but CS say there are no seats available. Operator found it odd and needs to "check with another department", revenue management I guess.

Did anyone else encounter problems booking junior awards as of lately? I know the upgrade availability tool can't be trusted, but did the award inventory also go bezerk?

NoWindowSeat

casper79

always. Site availability doesn't match reality for juniors. However, current count of junior award tickets is 14 and they always have cleared the day after.

FFlash

I made SH junior bookings a couple of weeks back. Outbound no space, waitlisted and cleared next day, inbound only J seats available which I took. Well, kinda "jewels to pigs" waste to use points for juniors in business, but they need to learn to do some business, right?

I have never succeeded book online for juniors, I think it is designed that way so that you must call.

intuition

CS agent called me back 20 minutes later and let me know seats have been made available and booking was made.

Explanation given was that there had been limited number of seats and perhaps that me checking availability at the same time had blocked them, but I find that pretty unlikely. And with casper79's experience I say there is something fishy with junior awards.

I was also thinking like NoWindowSeat, that they might be controlling junior awards tighter because of upcoming changes to the program, but as casper79 had the same issue for 14 trip (!) I'd say there is something generally blocking agents from using U class for junior awards.

intuition

I disagree J awards for juniors are wasted! This is the only way to secure junior isn't boarding in group 58, seated in 58Ö and so on. IME junior in Y cabin can't select seat (all seats except the designated is marked as occupied) and they are blocked from boarding until last pax.
Also, J awards SH are usually available even late in the game, while econ awards are zeroed out many months ahead.
Finally, some routes has only J tickets. They are never offered in Y, not even as revenue Y. Some routes are only priced in D (and luckily U is applied on these routes)

AFAIK, you must call. There is no use-case implemented where you book junior awards. Juniors themselves are blocked from using their points for anything other than some mumin stuff. You can't book an award for anyone else, and booking engine does not allow awards to be searched for any other passenger type than adult anyway.

LoungeEnthusiast

Had major problems booking Y junior award intra-EU for beginning of next January. Had to waitlist like four different options for the inbound and none of them cleared (I’m Gold, don’t know if it would have made any difference if I was still Plat). CS suggested upgrading to J with my voucher, because J award space did exist, so that’s what I ended up doing. Won’t hurt my teenager, he has grown to appreciate J travelling already. 😊

I use roughly 10 s/h junior awards a year, never before has it been this hard to find availability.

intuition

Did you see availability in the online booking before calling?

LoungeEnthusiast

intuition

Technically, I guess you can trust it to show U avilability, as you would be able to book an adult if you proceeded with the online booking. At least I haven't heard about anyone starting the online booking, finding availability, but then later in the booking process be denied to finalize.
It seems thoug as CS does not see the same availability which is odd/bad.