quinella66

Over the past serveral years, I have made award reservations with five different airlines and it always worked like this:

I make an award rez on a courtesy hold and I then have 1-2 weeks to verify that my wife and I can get off of work for the allotted time and then once confirmed, I call them back and confirm the reservation.

It seems that NW has changed this policy (apparently the others, at least CO and AA, have not) in the last 2 years so that they can only make a courtesy hold on an award rez for 24 hours. With my wife working in a hospital needing a few days to approve a vacation request and a system of capacity controls that makes it darn near impossible to ascertain a set of dates with juggling, this puts a serious devaluation on my miles. They say that I will be charged a $50 fee per ticket to change the rez after 24 hours.

They only thing that they could tell me that I can do is either submit a complaint online (so they can ignore my email like they did the last time) or call the courtesy desk, which I just called and heard the recorded message "We are experiencing high call volume, call again later." Not even an 800 number and not even allowed to wait on hold. I will try again later, but it is frustrating.

It seems that this is a pretty bad system and thankfully other airlines have not adopted it. I think I may just stop acquiring NW miles and earn them with another airline. We will see what they have to say when I call them...

yevlesh2

I've got to say that this is the first time I've ever heard about a 2 week courtesy hold. I think it was 24 hours for quite a while now, at least for the last 2 years.

quinella66

Really? I have done them for years. I booked one at NW about 3 years ago under those conditions, one at CO a couple months ago, and called AA yesterday to see if the policy had changed. The AA rep told me that this policy would be one to "discourage customer loyalty" and that AA has no forseeable plans to implement it. I may call the airlines of my other programs to see if the policy has been implemented anywhere else.

jwhite4

Given that NWA already locks any miles you use to make a reservation (ie. if you only have 80k miles in your account you can't make 10 award holds for tickets to Hawaii), I'm not sure why they think they need to do this.

Jeff

santo

Not exactly correct. There are other options available to you to do it cheaper ($0-$25). For details visit (Under Itinerary Changes):
http://www.nwa.com/freqfly/travel/unused.shtml

quinella66

Interesting, I did not know that. Though, it seems that this is for "changes that CAN be made on nwa.com". Because I was looking at flights that needed to use NW's partner, COPA, I had no option but to make the reservation on the phone with an agent (in fact they have to call COPA and get a response on availability within 24 hours before even booking it) and thus have no choice but to pay the $5 fee to reserve and thus have no choice but to pay the $50 if it needs to be changed.

They decide to implement unfriendly customer policies and then tell me that I have to pay to work around them. After calling the "Customer Care" line several times I finally got through and submitted a complaint. It probably will do nothing though as that person seemed rather convinced that this policy will never change. I am looking at shifting my miles earning to AA who does not have such a policy.

For the record, I called CO and AA and their policies work like this:

CO: reserve courtesy hold for 10 days - you must call within 10 days or rez is dropped.

AA: reserve courtesy hold for 14 days - if you do not call within 14 days, someone else can claim those award seats if there are no more available.

I last booked DL in mid-2003 and they allowed a courtesy hold.

Funny that when I asked about the $5 fee for talking with a human, the excuse was that "the other airlines also do it". Now with this issue, I fired that same (lousy) excuse back at them and they said "Well I am surprised as CO and DL have virtually the same programs as we do."

jimc_usa

[QUOTE=quinella66]Interesting, I did not know that. Though, it seems that this is for "changes that CAN be made on nwa.com". Because I was looking at flights that needed to use NW's partner, COPA, I had no option but to make the reservation on the phone with an agent (in fact they have to call COPA and get a response on availability within 24 hours before even booking it) and thus have no choice but to pay the $5 fee to reserve and thus have no choice but to pay the $50 if it needs to be changed.

They decide to implement unfriendly customer policies and then tell me that I have to pay to work around them. After calling the "Customer Care" line several times I finally got through and submitted a complaint. It probably will do nothing though as that person seemed rather convinced that this policy will never change. I am looking at shifting my miles earning to AA who does not have such a policy. QUOTE]

What NW doesn't say is, if you need change the award again (first grandchild late) you cannot do it on line and it will cost you $50.00!!!!!

Brendan

Twice I made a reward res this year, relying on the possibility of changing online for no or a reduced fee. Both times the online system could not handle the change & a dozen agents refused to waive the $%$@#& fee !

I had 63K in October 2004 when I decided I wanted to fly J to Europe requiring 80--90K & grab available flights in the meantime. I needed to know which airline to which to credit my 40K Lending Tree miles--not to an airline without suitable availability & routings. Most NW agents refused to even check flights for me 'cause I didn't have the miles there ready to book. So I called DL 4a courtesy hold because both airlines use the same Sky Team inventory. Several times I have given up the last FF seat on a flight I no longer wanted & seen it become available again .

HeelLaw

Perhaps I'm being selfish, but...

I, for one, am glad that people cannot tie up award seats (that they're not going to use) for days and weeks at a time without any kind of penalty. If there was a two-week courtesy hold on NW (and this is the first time I've heard of it), think how much harder it would potentially be to ever find an award seat.

I realize that Plats can essentially do this, I'm just glad that the rest of the world can't.

keithguy

The rest of WorldPerks members may not be able to, but CO OnePass members allows for award seats to be held, so the basic OnePass member can hold NW award seats while WorldPerks members cannot.

This also applies to AS members to a lesser extent, and probably to many other OAL programs.

ET

I believe AS changed their hold rule, at least for redemption on other airlines. They used to hold for 2 weeks (Feb '04, AA award), then it changed to something really short like 3 days, and now I don't think they will hold at all. I'm assuming it's across the board for redemptions for NW FF tix as it is with AA FF tix, but I may be mistaken.

worldexpress

nothing personal but i sure don't want someone holding up seats for 2 weeks when i need them.

keithguy

AS has a three day cancellation grace period, still better than NW's one day. DL members also have the ability to hold award reservations for two weeks (again, not even mentioning the other partners at this point).

HeelLaw

Well that's annoying.

I don't have a big problem with a 24/48 hold. But really, I don't think it's fair to other members to keep seats locked up for days or weeks at a time.

Yaatri

I agree with worldexpress and HeelLaw that holding seats is unfair to other members. Also, it makes inventory management of award seats hell leading to lowere avialbility and general disatisfaction among members.