Online Award Booking
 

Web sites have come a long way, but there are not many who have adopted online award booking. Does anyone have any online award booking stories or advice?

Well, United has online award booking, but I don't think I'll ever have the chance to use it in its current form. It it limited to booking only award travel for yourself, and only domestic travel at that. Most of my awards are used for international tickets, and most of those include others on the itinerary. So while it's a great idea, it's still got a long way to go, IMHO.

Have only used United's new system once, and it worked very nice for me.

I tried using UAL's system to check availability of seats, but much to my dismay I found that it does not properly handle requests for more than one seat. It will show all flights that have an available seat, even if you request more than one seat and the flights do not have enough seats to accomodate your request.

Also, it cannot handle complex itinerary, such as stopovers, open jaws, etc.

Im waiting for Continental to start online booking. Its global partner NW has been doing so for a long time, and its starting to ANNOY ME that OnePass (definitely the better program between the two) members cant do the same.

However, I do remember taking a survey recently where adding online reward booking was one of the options listed under wanted improvements. Hope that means its soon to come.

I used Northwest's site once. I thought it was implemented well, unfortunately I could not get what I was looking for because of capacity controls.

I have used NWA's online booking for award travel several times and found it very user-friendly. I booked my daughter a trip to Paris in January with her first choice of travel date, selected a good coach aisle seat from the seat map, and ordered her a vegetarian meal. It all went like clockwork (the booking and the travel). A good experience all around. I also booked a domestic trip for my husband in January and had a similarly good experience.

A tip on UA's on-line booking: the reservations line permits booking award travel a full two days more in advance of the on-line system. So, if you are booking right at the 11 month maximum, call instead of trying on-line.

Used NW's site a number of times for checking availability; one time for actually booking.

One really annoying thing about the site is that if there is no avail on the date you selected, you have to go back to previous page and change your criteria. However, if there *is* avail, you get buttons at the bottom of the page that let you view avail for prev/next day!

DELTA, are you reading this? Your recent website upgrade was fine. However, please consider this feature as well as redeeming awards is the biggest problem with the Skymiles program.

I looked at United's Online booking feature and was not impressed. There are no provisions for international travel, open jaw, and companion booking. United needs more work on this new feature!

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Getting Closer to The Million Mile Dream!

I used United's online system to book my PIP award. Went smoothly, although I had to call to pick the seat I wanted.

I can't comment on this one, as the boys in Dallas need to play catch-up, and do a serious upgrade for the AAdvantage portion of their site. And remember guys, KISS, keep it simple stupid; don't overload things with useless graphics, keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it fast. Oh, and how about throwing in some seat maps so we can pick our own seats?

Gave up on QFs site, for similar reasons to the UA site (no open-jaw, intl or flexibility) and I wanted to specifically catch a flight via MEL to launceston from SYD not a direct and it just would not give me the option (I needed to fly at a specific time in the day). Called reservations they were able to do everything immediately over the phone, sympathised with the limited online system, no wait, pleasant attitude so why do it online - offers nothing but hassle.

Online has to offer advantages in terms of time, options or cost otherwise there is just no point. Of course that is not intended as an open excuse for airlines to under-staff their call centres so as to force us to go online.

Mark