Trouble getting credit on partner airlines
 

In the past year I've flown two Delta partners (SAA and Virgin) and have given both my Delta FF number. For the SAA flights I got credit in only one direction, and now, more than a month after the Virgin flights, I still don't have credit on Delta.

This got me wondering if others have trouble when flying one airline and seeking FF credit on another (partner) airline.

I write for the travel section of the Washington Post and other newspapers as a freelance contributor and years ago authored the books NetTravel (1997) and Internet Travel Planner (Globe 2000 and 2002). I'm planning to write about this issue for the Post. You can see some of my stories at my site: www.nettravel.com

So, my questions are:

-- have you had this problem and how did you resolve it? Was it difficult or time-consuming to get credit and how long did it take?

-- do you think this is intentional or just airlines losing info?

-- do you have any advice on how to prevent this problem and get the airlines to deposit the proper mileage credits in your FF accounts?

Thanks for any and all comments.

send in the boarding passes to dl [keep copies]....it has happened a few times to me.....i always keep the bp's until the mi's post....the bp's also make good book marks.

Another part of the problem is that many online travel sites and even the airline sites themselves don't properly allow the entry of partner FF numbers.

I just went through this with a bunch of reservations.

Orbitz is fully aware of partnerships and alliances when buying a ticket - you can search by Star Alliance, SkyTeam or oneworld when buying a ticket. But they have no way to put in a partner FF#, such as using my United MP# on an itinerary with US Airways flights. Tricks such as putting in the whole # with the airline code first (e.g. UA123456878012) doesn't actually get it in the record.

Same problem with Travelocity and Expedia, added by their not recognizing alliances at all.

Delta.com has no way to enter partner FF#s when buying a ticket, so I always have to call their poor outsourced call center to enter my Northwest number.

Northwest actually is excellent in this regard - at nwa.com you can put in FF#s from most of the SkyTeam airlines including DL.

American is like Delta - no way to enter partner numbers without calling in.

Also sometimes the airline systems seem to have problems with partner numbers if you were logged into their website with your own id on the selling airline. For example, if you are logged into delta.com with your skymiles number, it gets into your itinerary. When you call them to add a different number, sometimes it doesn't replace the Delta number.

In general, it's a time-consuming mess. I don't think it's really deliberate, just poor system design, poor integration of systems, and a "our-airline-centric" view of system and data requirements. The FF programs are 25 years old now, but the big airline alliances are only 6 or 10 years old. These things probably just weren't thought out when their systems were built. Airlines that have closer one-on-one relationships such as NW/KL/CO may have built deeper integration.

Personally I'd like to see that it be a requirement of the alliances that their websites take all the FF#s of their partner airlines. But it looks like they don't really care.

I do know that I have booked away from Delta because it's so hard to get my NW FF# in it.

Agreed. I don't think it's intentional, just a failure of interoperability within the alliances, exacerbated by the move toward "automated" (untouched by human hands) internet ticketing.

In order for an alliance to work right, there should be a seamless (transparent to the user) mechanism for crediting flights on one airline to a Frequent Flyer program on another airline in the alliance. As MarkXS says, most of the airlines (while happy to sell you a code-share on their website) do not have a simple and effective way to enter another Frequent Flyer program number when buying a ticket on their website.

Northwest is probably the leader in making this happen, since they have a drop-down menu that brings up the partner programs for you to select, and then to input your number in that program, but the other sites don't seem to have this.

When purchases were made using a real person, you and the ticket agent could try to get the information into the record, but with a machine this is usually impossible (unless, as with Northwest, the machine is programmed that way). I know folks who tried to make it work by putting the other program information in "comments" or "remarks", but with varying success.

Then you have the other problem of making the number stick. In too many cases, the airline on whose metal the flight is actually going will ask you to check in with them, or at least will provide a new boarding card on their stock printed from their machines, and in the process their machine will often print their own flight number instead of the code-share number for that flight and sometimes lose the "foreign" Frequent Flyer number and account in the process. (I've found this to be a real problem with getting Lufthansa Miles and More credit when flying on Lutfthansa's partners' metal.)

Sooner or later the alliances will have to solve this problem, and it really isn't that hard to solve if the airlines would stop being so parochial and think in terms of being part of an alliance. Until that happens, however, the old rules still apply:

1. Keep all boarding passes, and copies of tickets (e- or paper) until the miles actually post to your account.

2. If they don't post within a reasonable period of time (I consider one month a reasonable period of time), contact your Frequent Flyer Program account folks and ask for the credit.

This just happened to me for the first time. A friend and I flew on AC metal purchased on UA.poo. My May 23 miles still haven't posted, but the return flight did. When I got home on June 3, I waited a few days, then sent in my BP. That was two weeks ago!

Talked to my friend today and not only is he missing his miles, but the CSR couldn't even find him in the system! :rolleyes:

I have had pretty good luck historically - all OW flights post to QF and AA.

But on a recent itinerary I am missing 3 segments in my AAdv account. Segments on the same itinerary posted within days, but these segments didn't. And in this case it is not non-interoperability nor inability to enter the FF numbers correctly. The ticket was issued by AA, the reservation was made by AA (so I figure they know how to enter FF #s especially their own) and clearly they entered them correctly as most of the segments posted correctly.

My wife and I have never had a problem getting our *A flights (TG, LH, BD, and JK so far) credited to our MP accounts. Reading the United forum, others haven't been so lucky, especially with LH apparently.

Forgot to point out my thread about trying to get my UA # into a mixed US Metal with US/UA codeshare purchased on americanexpress.com. CSR's with Online travel agents who should know better don't even know what to do.

I did just purchase a flight on united.com that was the other way around: all UA flight#s but some are UA codeshares on US metal. When I called US, they already had my UA# in the reservation.

So some of the airlines' interconnections actually work.

The advice from both clacko and Counsellor to save your original boarding passes is critical, however "good" certain sites may be. Sooner or later, probably sooner, somebody is going to drop your desired FF# and you're going to have to mail things in.

Don't fly Air Canada metal if you want *A partner credit (or seat assignments). :mad:

I booked an SFO-YVR ticket on united's website - the flights were codeshare on AC metal. [Of course, UA doesn't inform you that you have to check in at AC rather than UA, and that AC is in the SFO domestic terminal even though last I checked British Columbia was not part of the 50 states :rolleyes: but that is another matter.]

Anyway, I had my UA MP # and Mrs. Boraxo's # in both the UA and AC the reservation records, it even printed the #s on the AC boarding passes. Lo and behold, no flight credits. :eek: I then went through a song and dance with UA regarding the missing miles. UA demanded the E-ticket serial # (which I never received), and the credit card statement doesn't provide the full 16-digit #. We finally received our measely 1600 miles each after sending in the original AC boarding cards and the email itinerary. [Both AC and UA also said it was impossible to get advance seat assignments though that was never disclosed up front either - but that's another story.]

Contrast to my experience with another *A carrier - SAS - which posted the miles very quickly. ^

It will be a cold day in ++++ before I fly AC again. :td:

In Skyteam, I've had some problems with Delta and Korean segments posting. In other partners, I've had problems with Copa as well. NW, CO, KLM and such always post with no problems.

In the past I've gotten Qantas credit on AA as quickly as AA credit, but it's coming up on two weeks since my return flight now - more than that for the outbound leg - and nada for either. I'm just waiting for the 15-day minimum since the return flight to request credit for both via AA's Web form (which lets you request missing credit for any oneWorld airline flight). When I've done this in the past for a random glitch in an AA flight it's worked well.

So it's not intentional...
 

I spoke with an airline analyst and a FF expert for my story and both said that this problem of getting proper credit is not intentional, that it's usually due to incompatibility among CRSs. Their argument was that it takes airlines more time to fix these problems so they'd prefer to get it right the first time. Still, it seems that it wouldn't take that much effort to put in place better systems that could prevent many of these errors, don't you think?

Seems pretty much hit-and-miss. Re: Boraxo's experience with Air Canada not posting UA miles, I've had the opposite experience. Never had a problem with getting AC miles posted to my UA MP account, whether it was an AC flight# or a UA codeshare. I don't doubt that Boraxo and others had problems though; sometimes it even seems to depend on which station was involved.

I did get really bothered that because I was going BOS-YYZ-YVR, YVR-YOW-BOS I only got 50% miles for the Toronto-Vancouver and Vancouver-Ottawa legs. Should have read the fine print on UA's site about AC. But that's not their fault, that was mine for not checking the conditions for discount fare earnings. AC did post to MP exactly what they should have - just not what I'd hoped for.

I've since learned my lesson, hence my opening up a LAN account for oneworld airline earnings so that I can get credit for my intra-Argentina discount flights on LAN Argentina that wouldn't count for AAdvantage. The downside to these partnerships is that they have a lot of uneven conditions. The upside is that you often can find a way to work around it by joining another program in the alliance. I figure that this year I'll post all my AA flights to LAN instead of to AA, along with those LAN flights. Throw in a few HHonors double-dips (at 1000 LAN kilometers per stay) and I can score a 40k (slightly less than 25,000 miles) domestic North America reward on AA or AS. Since I wouldn't have a shot at getting status on AA anyway given my usual travel patterns, this works out well. Plus it gives me a program that lets me earn credit for BA US-UK flights that aren't valid for AAdvantage, in case I ever take the convenient DEN-LHR nonstop.

Of course all that assumes that the partner credits post as planned. The whole topic of this thread.

Oh one other thing I do, and I'm sure other FT'ers do something similar: I keep a spreadsheet for each program, with current and projected trips, miles expected to be earned, including all elite and special promo bonuses. As soon as I book a trip I enter the expected miles from air, hotel, car, deals etc. Then I know what to expect to see, when I look at the online statement summaries, and can easily tell if something didn't post. Don't trust my memory!

Yes. It happens frequently. If you do not xerox your boarding pass and send it in, you will rarely get the credit.

It's a very common problem...
 

that seems to be gradually improving. I retain copies of all my boarding passes and tickets (sometimes having to remind the FA to return the boarding pass if they've used it to hang with my jacket) until mileage posts. If not, I send a copy of both to the program and sometimes have to do it a second time. I've never had persistance fail to pay off.