OW rant/frustration and ST comparison
 

Getting frustrated with OW.

(LOVING DELTA MORE AND MORE EACH DAY)

BA.com is horrible, buggy.

Finding classic awards on lan.com that don't correlate to award space with BA miles (sometimes)

Depends on rep, some will search LAN argentina space some won't.

"LAN ARGENTINA IS LAN CHILE's PARTNER, IT'S NOT OUR FIRST PRIORITY IN OUR SEARCHES"

oh really?

Then I don't even know if they are making it up sometimes.

Then I try to do a one way Intra S Amer award using AA miles.

AA rep says nothing available.

LAN.com says 10k km for the award, so it's at the classic level.

I don't care if it's LAN that doesn't release the inventory, BA which doesn't see or doesn't allow the booking or AA that doesn't see/allow the booking,

I'M FRUSTRATED.

There is no clear rhyme or reason to any of this.

At least with SkyTeam using Skymiles, the rules are pretty straightforward, if it's a low award on a partner, you can book it. You don't get unlimited stopovers and the award calendar is horrible.

BUT, you can actually find the partner availability. And by searching one ways you can find low awards on Delta.

So I really regret taking the bait and switch of the 50% AMEX deal. I should have just shipped 200K Amex for the 67% DL offer...

OK rant over.

Thanks

P.S. YQ is evil and super mean

I think much of this could be addressed if OW carriers allowed searching through partner award inventory on their website. For example, AA is pretty good at searching for paid fares, but you cannot search for any award on a partner via aa.com - even if it's an AA codeshare. Even for AA it's iffy, as I've found inventory by calling that wasn't visible on the website (some of that is expanded availability to EXPs, but I saw this even before becoming EXP).

However, I will gladly keep the current system, convoluted as it is, than exchange my cache of AAdvantage miles for SkyPesos. I'd like to stick with AA redemption rates and partner F awards.

But I do agree, YQ is super mean.

There is a reason for it: LA doesn't release inventory to partners. As simple as that, a lot of their seats are available to their own members only. Just transfer points to LA and book them there.

And I doubt that this problem doesn't exist in Skyteam. Sure enough in *A you have this as well.

How do you do that?

Do you mean transfer amex mr points to LAN?

Or can I transfer BA aviopesos or AA pesetaas?

I already burnt my last 100K mr pts converting them to BA aviopesos for the 50% baitandswi--- err-- bonus.

Seriously though OW is opaquer than Skypesos/Flying Bleu

And how do you know it's LA that doesn't release inventory?

Do a search on the LA forum and other *O airline forums - it's mentioned often enough along with anecdotes to be credible.

You can transfer SPG points to LAN km at a rate of 1:2. So for people with an SPG Amex this is ideal.

I had the situation more than once. Seats show up on LAN.com but I couldn't book it using miles from other programs. Only when I used my LA kms was I able to get the seat. And as serfty has said, there are many others here on FT who have the same issue.

Thanks.