godsquare

I just went through a weird situation with United phone agent.

Today, ANA start accepting reservations for their new flight NH846 (SIN->NRT) and NH174 (NRT->IAH)

I try to book these two flights, along with some others, as the following:

ORD->ICN->SYD |7 days stop-over| SYD->BKK | 1 month | BKK->SIN->NRT->IAH->ORD

I am pretty sure my routing is valid (if not, please kindly enlighten me) and I already verify that all segment have an available seat. But, of course, United website gave me an error.

I called United reservation center, and got a lovely lady to assist me. Everything was fine until I mentioned SIN->NRT segment (NH846) and NRT->IAH (NH174) and she said she could not see the flight from both award and revenue inventory.

I already double-checked that both flight shows up on United.com and one can book it online (i.e., it is not a "phantom" award availability).

Any suggestions?

Edit:

I can book ORD->ICN->BKK and BKK->SIN->NRT->IAH->ORD online separately but combining them (in every combination I tried) results in an error.

sbm12

I had similar issues with LH404 recently (the late FRA-JFK flight). Ask the agent to try to "long sell" the segment. It should come back confirmed if there really is space.

mahasamatman

Is this an award or revenue booking? If award, how did you "verify" there is an award seat available?

godsquare

Award seat.

I can verify it by trying to book the award. If it is a "phantom", you will get an error before going to personal information page.

The thing is, my phone agent cannot even find the flight itself.

mherdeg

Yeah, the phrase "long sell" refers to a reservation-system process where you assert that the flight exists; like, you type in commands which say

"add a sector on NH174 NRT-IAH 03 Nov"

and then the reservation system accepts, or denies, your command. No "finding the flight" needed.

mahasamatman

Not necessarily. There are hundreds of ways bugs can manifest themselves.

channa

This is a known issue with new flights and SHARES. It takes an extra few days before they're sometimes loaded into SHARES. The website may even show them because it queries ITA, IIRC, but it won't confirm because SHARES doesn't see them yet.

I had this earlier this year with the new TK flight SFO-IST. The issue has been going on as far I can remember back in the CO days.

FlyerBeek

It goes without saying, I suppose, but the challenge will be finding an agent willing to "long sell" an award segment. This is getting much more difficult in my experience.

-FlyerBeek

godsquare

Thanks. So my best bet is to wait for a few days?

Edit: assuming that I might not be able to find an agent to long-sell those segments for me?

channa

That would be the least frustrating thing to do and preserve as much of your hair as possible.

Of course there's a chance the inventory changes and you lose the space, but getting someone at UA to deviate from the computer can be thoroughly exasperating.

godsquare

That I agree, lol.

Thank you for your suggestion.

generic123

If those two flights really are bookable online, then make an online reservation that includes those two legs within a simple itinerary (e.g., conventional roundtrip). Then call within 24 hours to change the itinerary to your desired one with the stopover, taking care to not touch those two legs. No change fee that way and no $25 phone booking fee either.

augias84

@generic123: I've done this in the past, and it works! You just book the flight that the united agents claim isn't there but that you know is there (in my case, it was a Lufthansa first class award flight segment) online, then call them once it's issued to tack on the rest of the itinerary.

godsquare

OK. How about this. These award seats also showed up on ANA search tool.

channa

If this is the new flight bug, it usually won't confirm or ticket. That's because when it gets to SHARES to save, SHARES won't have it, causing a mismatch, and ticketing to fail.

You can certainly try, but that's been my experience.



Yes, because the flights are there and open for award. CO.com can see it (ITA engine), ANA can see it, Aeroplan will see it. It's just SHARES that can't see it.