The new web interface is horrible.

Other than that, is anyone having trouble with Award Travel searches?

How can I select First or Biz class for my search?

The dropdown for class always seems to 'grey out' or become disabled when I load the page.

I tried it with FireFox and IE...same results.

Am I missing something? (entirely possible with this CICS style interface)

thanks

Well, the interface shows all classes, perkpass and perksaver coach and FC/Biz when the reward page results come up, so I don't think it's necessary to fill in the class when searching.

When searching for multi-city trips, "search by schedule" doesn't seem to work. The site returns whole itineraries just as if you clicked "search by price" rather than showing you all the options for just one leg at a time.

It's possible to workaround the bug and choose the filghts you want using the "select this flight" link in the results screen, but because the results consist of whole itineraries, it doesn't always display all the options available.

Search by schedule seems to work fine for roundtrips.

When searching for an open-jaw award ticket, I was able to select the outbound. It then gave me no options at all for the return, just the bar that said something like"select your return flight", but nothing was shown below that. Routing requested was SEA-IST/BUD-SEA for the IT folks. Will be happy to be PM'ed for more troubleshooting details.

I have been putting together a few US-EUR-INDIA award tix lately and noticed some flaky behavior.

First, the "calendar display" simply doesnt work for India, it shows maybe one day of availability, but if you step thru day by day you can find AF, NW and KLM availability in WBC (actually far better luck finding seats than I would have expected). That's time consuming.

But the bigger problem is that AF availability comes and goes in a way that suggests it's not being searched or there is a data feed disconnection sometimes. I've done this for the past week, for a couple of hours an evening, so this is not a try twice and complain comment.... I actually find AF availability comes and goes on a particular day every 10 or so minutes. Dont like the results... just wait. It's impossible that this is a seat being take and redeposited.

Any way, I ultimately found (all business class) 1 ticket SEA-CDG-GVA-CDG-SEA (all AF) and another SEA-CDG-BOM-AMS (surface) CDG-SEA (mix AF and NW). Amazingly, I found the SEA-CDG segments for these tix on the same day, so the two people can even travel together. The India space availability is also far better than you would think if you are willing to use both the stopover and open jaw in Europe to break the trips up. Lessons learned, outside of peak summer travel, searching segment by segment results in pretty good availability, but the new tool makes that pretty painful since the calendar display feature doesn't show many flights.

Bugs
 

I have found that when searching for multi-city trips and you have chosen the first leg of your flight, any change to the search features (meaning re-checking the by price, schedule, or dates) completely boots me out of the search. I then have to re-populate the departure city, dates.....etc.

Hnl-sin Can You Believe This?
 

Look what comes up when I look HNL-SIN. This is outreageous. And I am
not talking about the price. This is the first option!!! Why are they trying to sell me other airlines?????
" $2,728.00 $2,796.30 Total Price »
Select this Departure » Thur, Jan 31 Northwest Airlines 9 Equipment: 747 View Seat Map »
Booking class: Y/Coach
Fare basis code: YLE
Depart: 9:40 AM Honolulu/Oahu, HI (HNL) Meal: Dinner
Arrive: 1:55 PM Tokyo (NRT) Approx. flight miles: 3,829
Duration: 9 hr 15 min

Time between flights: 3 hr 35 min Fri, Feb 1 United Airlines 803 Equipment: Boeing 777 Booking class: Y/Coach
Fare basis code: YLE
Depart: 5:30 PM Tokyo (NRT) Meal: Dinner
Arrive: 11:59 PM Singapore (SIN) Approx. flight miles: 3,321
Duration: 7 hr 29 min

This flight arrives 1 day after departure
Total duration: 20 hr 19 min
Select this Return » Thur, Feb 7 Japan Airlines 712 Equipment: Boeing 777 Booking class: O/Coach
Fare basis code: YLE
Depart: 8:20 AM Singapore (SIN) Meal: Meal
Arrive: 4:00 PM Tokyo (NRT) Approx. flight miles: 3,321
Duration: 6 hr 40 min

Time between flights: 4 hr 10 min Thur, Feb 7 Northwest Airlines 10 Equipment: 747 View Seat Map »
Booking class: Y/Coach
Fare basis code: YLE
Depart: 8:10 PM Tokyo (NRT) Meal: Dinner
Arrive: 7:25 AM Honolulu/Oahu, HI (HNL) Approx. flight miles: 3,829
Duration: 6 hr 15 min

Total duration: 17 hr 5 min"

"Ghost" Award Seats
 

tried to book award seat for LAX-SIN on nwa.com

1) showed "eco-saver" for 30K each direction on nw -> itin. showed 60K for the total trip and few $ for tax -> next step : "request cannot be processed - please call nw agent"
2) showed "eco-saver" for 30K on AF (LAX-CDG-SIN) and 30K on NW (SIN-NRT-LAX) -> itin. showed 60K for total trip and few more $ for tax (Paris is always chic and not cheap!) ->next step : "request cannot be processed - please call nw agent"

when I called NW Plat Elite line:
1) I don't know where are you getting 60K ? I don't see any availibity for
even 240K !
2) wow...this is not a valid routing....we can't route thru CDG

I was transferred to Tech Support
4 minutes to get a "live" help - got mysteriously disconnected
10 minutes to get "live" help the second time - Tech logged in and ran the same itin search and found the same results - couldn't figure it out why the system gives "unbookable" option - talked to his super - 2 minutes wait-time

final verdict
"we have been having a lot of issues with the reservation engine - it appears that the on-line reservation system laggs behind in updating the actual availibity for that moment - so one part of the system show you something which is not there in the first place - then when you try to get it, the other part of the system recognizes that whatever you are asking is not there - and hence, it directs you to the nw reservation agent who has a different system with the most updated availibity....sorry for the inconvinience"

Even on basic non-stop round trip itineraries, many flight options are not returned. I was searching MSP-FLL for example, and only got two itineraries returned. But when I clicked on "Choose this flight" for the first leg, I then had more options for the second leg that were not previously available. The new options had exactly the same price, so it's not like nwa.com was just hiding outrageously priced itineraries from me.

Also, multi-day search doesn't show prices for same-day returns that do exist.

BDQBDQ-
thanks for hunting down the ghost availability issue with tech support and sharing the results.

I too was having this problem and couldnt for the life of me get thru to tech support. It's complete BS that they say it's a timelag. I still see the same availability 2 days later that I saw and called about. The system is returning all sorts of availability on CDG-BOM that is not there, it's been showing these flights now for 2 days. If they have that kind of time lag then this is a pretty crappy system. I think rather this is a bug or two that doesnt get caught until you try to actually ticket it.

The invalid awards (US-SIN via CDG) that are displayed, that cannot have anything to do with a time delay, that's just crummy programming. I kept finding SIN-NRT-DTW-CDG when I was looking for SIN-CDG, nothing like the really long way around the world!

Ah- finally found a good one that works in our favor ;)

I was just modifying a half used award booking online where the outbound had been perkpass (2x cost) and the return was perksaver. I hate the change online functionality because it shows you a list of flights for a particular day, but not how many miles (saver or pass) you would need until several pages after you select the new flights, so I had already looked and confirmed a particular day and flight was available for saver. I went through all the online change screens and imagine my surprise that the tool wanted to give me back the perksaver premium for the first (already flown) leg of the award. Genius guys!

Tried to check-in for a 4-segment MR. Told couldn't check in online for anything more than 3 segments. Last Demember, using the OLD website, was easily able to print out boarding passes for a 4-segment MR. I'm really getting tired of the new website being unable to accomplish simple tasks that were performed by the old interface. Soon, I predict, customers will be leaving too.

Really surprising that NW would purposely choose to substantially degrade their booking engine, so suppose this is simple incompetence in their IT department. They have not responded to my various emails suggesting problems that need to be fixed

One example among many: trying to book an open jaw DTW-PDX, PHX-DTW:

Every day I try I get a different list of flights available. I know there are many more, and more convenient flights available, because I have telephoned the Elite line on several occasions. But they don't show up, whether I search by price or schedule. When searching by schedule I have tried increasing the number of choices from the default 20 to 40. But as the flight screen returns with choices, the 40 changes back to 20 and no additional flights are shown.

So I would have to book by telephone. Unless NW is playing a very deep game, I don't see how this benefits them

Yikes, what a mess. Never thought anyone could outdo USAirways disaster last year, but this is something else.

Trying to book award travel in Oct LAX-SIN-LAX... tells me I can get the outbound segment as a perksaver for 60K miles. Select that one, flight shows up in the outbound segment window. So far so good. Return flight shows that there is another perksaver business class seat available for 60K. The excitement builds.... I select that flight and it takes me right back to the beginning and asks me to choose any departing flight.

When I do manage to come up with a pair of flights that gets me past the above situation, I get


* The itinerary selected is no longer available. Please make another selection. (Message 101)
* We are sorry, there was a problem completing this reservation. Please contact Northwest Reservations at 1-800-225-2525 for assistance. (Message 183)


Of course it looks like it will let me go in a coach seat.

Last year (August) with the old site, I wasn't able to do OLCI for a non-MR (I call it a mini-MR since I maximized the EQM and EQS on a trip I was making) of TPA-MSP-MCI-DTW-RDU for the same reason as your MR, and the return of RDU-DTW-MCI-MEM-TPA was the same no OLCI, for the same reason.