When doing a plan and book itinerary the system brings up invalid options - i.e. after booking a CPT - LHR - JFK - HKG is you then put in to do and HKG - JNB I regularly get the option of HKG - JNB on cx which is fine, but the next option is usually HKG - LHR - JNB or even HKG - HEL - LHR - JNB - neither of which are valid. I've also been offered for a JFK - GIG the routing JFK - LHR - GIG

Availability bug?
 

I've decided to play around with the booking engine for an upcoming DONE4 I have, and D availability on many segments appears very very poor, much more than in my experience using the phone. For example, I'm trying to book a HKG-CDG segment, and only BA comes up via LHR, for days on end, even though there are 3 CX non-stop flights a day. Same for a BOS-GRU. Only BOS-MIA-GRU comes up, never BOS-JFK-GRU, for weeks on end. Is D availability really that bad, or is this engine kak?

Do I detect a fellow :) South African

How far ahead are you looking and are you using plan & book option or the plan option?

Plan & book option searches for live availability. If you are looking 11+ months ahead it may be the airline hasn't released any seats into the CRS yet (but other airlines have). Plan option does not search for live availability and thus should find the missing flights.

Lekker, bru! Not from ZA, but spend a lot of time there...

It is for a flight in three weeks or so. It may be that it really is that bad, but I am very surprised that there is nothing in D in certain flights for weeks on end. Something is screwy in there, it seems.

You might also try getting an Asia Miles account and checking there for availability. It's bound to be more accurate. CX is famous for holding and not releasing seats it thinks that it might be able to sell itself.

To the extent that anecdotal evidence is worth anything, I fly LHR-HKG several times/year, nearly always on CX, and always on xONEx tix. In April, I couldn't get on the CX flight I wanted. There were seats available, but nothing in A class. When I got to LHR, I walked over to the CX ticket office and asked. They were happy to give me the last F seat for my xONEx ticket, an A class seat. (Of course, I had to shuttle back and forth to the AA ticket counter a couple of times since I had booked my itinerary with AA, but it worked out quite smoothly.)

Endless "Validating Itinerary..." until timeout occurs
 

I'm hoping someone out there can tell me what I need to tweak. It's been some time since I've played with the on-line booking tool and now I have a problem.

Whenever I try to use it, as soon as I enter the first two cities the "Validating Itinerary..." kicks in but never completes.
Also, the cities on the dispay never change colour (i.e. from green to red)

Same issue whether I'm using "Plan" or "Plan and Book", different cities, and different cabin class

Ideas?

with following simple itinerary

DFW-JFK-LAX-NRT-LHR-DFW

I get the following error message:
(My italic emphasis.)

There is nothing in the xONEx rules about country of origin stopovers. So is this another bug?
___________________________________________
Update: just checked the web page, which says:
So now, I guess the question is - can something that only appears on a One World web page be a rule, even though it is not in the Technical Rule Sheet?

UPDATE: Latest version of the rule sheet now has this retriction, see this thread

Has anyone had any problems with itineraries not saving (despite saying so) and have any solutions?

Yes, I keep having the same problem with the system 'loosing' some of my itineraries. No solution to propose.

Me too. I now print out any itinerary I make that I need to go back to later. A nuisance to have to re-enter all the info again though.

Booking an itinerary with 3 transits through LHR: CPT-LHR-MCT-LHR-IST-LHR-DFW, 2 of the transits are overnight but all 3 are less than 24hrs. The booking tool lists the following UK taxes: UK Air Passenger Duty 181.40 AUD
UK Passenger Service Charge 121.50 AUD .

Is that correct for transits under 24hrs?

Having just purchased a DONE3 YES.. those are approx the correct taxes.....

Thanks for the reply but I'm still not convinced:p
If I price the sectors out on www.itasoftware.com;then each transit gets charged GBP21.50 which is the UK Passenger Service Charge. GBP63.50 is about AUD114 . If ITA is correct then the Oneworld booking engine is incorrectly charging the UK Air Passenger Duty on every transit. Is there an exemption for less than 24hr transit or has ITA got it wrong?