Difficulty accessing AEP-USH awards
 

I have been trying to use the Qantas BA award search engines to find availability on some intra South American flights.

I can find award seats Santaigo (SCL) to Punta Arenas ( PUQ) but both systems do not recognise Ushuaia (USH) as a possible destination ( from Buenos Aires EZE / AEP or indeed from anywhere). Both are on the same latitude pretty well.

I am not saying that there are no award flights listed EZE/AEP-USH ( I understand that ) more that USH is just not recognised in the search engine at all. The BA agent did confirm that she could see USH as a destination but I am really not up to ringing twice daily to check- not an elite member. Unfortunately Expertflyer cannot access LAN award availability.

I cannot access the LAN award search.

Do you think it is a matter of LAN not thinking that it would be a popular flight for QFF/BA Exec members ( it is on LAN frequent flier destinations) or does the QFF/BA award system booking system simply not recognise USH as a possible destination-? computer or original software input glitch.

I’d be grateful for your thoughts?

It has been like that for over a year for BA search, and QF have a similar problem since they made some change to their awards search. Same thing for CUZ and other cities (GPS etc).

If you want to get LA seats using OW miles, you must do it 320/321 days in advance, after a day or two, they will remove their seats from the OW inventory, sometimes they put some seats back to the system.

I had problem an award few months ago, route PPT-IPC-SCL-MIA, after talking with AA, they spoke with the ticketing department for OW awards tickets, then they call LA, and magically in a minute, they opened a lot of seats for that route, it lasted over a week (7 seats available on each flight). This is a common problem for IPC-PPT-IPC, another hard to find is MIA-EZE on 4M.

Update

I did email BA and they told me that the problem was under repair but not so far.

You can check on LA and look for the lowest redemption fare, I think is 14K Km each way, then call BA, make sure they select AEP which is the domestic airport, not EZE.

I just tried few dates on LA and I'm getting 35K km, which means "0" awards for OW partners.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I am trying to book the award flights using Qantas points.

Same thing with QF, I was able to select different cities/airports with the old QF search, but with the new one, there are a lot of missing cities.

Thank you for that - I guess the question is

Does Qantas realise the loss of potential destinations in their updated search engine eg if they are uncommonly used - maybe none of their fliers have complained about it.

Their search process may just be a copy of the ones used by BA and or AA .

It would be interesting to know .

Was trying for this award with AS this past spring and nothing showed up in my narrow window (was booking close in). Would be nice for BA to recognize USH sometime in the future ^

Difficulty accessing AEP-USH awards
 

this award is hard to find unless you call in. quite inconvenient