Aer Lingus (EI) award booking experiences using UA miles [Consolidated]
 

Anybody with recent experience booking Aer Lingus flight with UA miles?

I am specifically looking at a segment ORD->DUB as part of a larger itinerary to BKK. Is this still a hassle to get ticketed?

I would need to cancel an existing, but sub-optimum, ticket to attempt the better one and I don't want to risk it if there are still major issues.

Thanks.

Booked DUB-ORD in J last March with no problems. Took 24hrs to ticket.

Thanks. I was able to get it booked, though the agent struggled with it for a bit.

Ticketed in just a couple of minutes.

this ^

I encountered the 24 hr to ticket for the first time earlier this year going ewr-lis-bcn-ewr with the lis-bcn leg on TAP. After booking the flight i attempted to purchase E+ but couldn't select the seats. I called UA customer service and was told my confirmation # wasn't valid. After noticing the "You will hear back within 24 hrs" email I waited until the "confirmation" email arrived, literally 24 hrs later. I was than able to select E+ and see my reservation on TAP's website.

I'm seeing a bunch of EI award availability for Christmas time ord-dub-lhr. There are a few AC flights, but not many. LH flights are long gone...I will miss redeeming miles on my ORD-FRA/DUS-LHR flights. Those were great and now they are gone :(

Yes, that is the time period that I just snagged my EI segment for.

I did see an AC option, but the connections time were too tight for my comfort, especially as the first flight was on an RJ later in the evening.

UA options really grim for the days right around Christmas. Seems to open up a bit for the week between Christmas and New Years, but I don't want to wait that long to get started on some vacation time.

While I hate the new award chart for *A First and Business, the lack of UA options are certainly pushing me to experience new routes / airlines. EI and BR on this trip. I will forsake UA Global First for BR Royal Laural...at least that is the impression I am getting from some trip reports.

Just encountered another snag on Aer Lingus award flight and hoping someone else has maybe experienced it / has info.

The trip has been booked and ticketed for some time and has always seemed fine during my frequent reservation checks. The Aer Lingus segment showed as fare class "Business (U)", which I understood corresponds to Aer Lingus award business class. I was able to call Aer Lingus and reserve a business class seat.

Checking today, the segment shows as fare class "Economy (U)". There was no change to my displayed seat assignment in row 2. A BR segment still shows as fare class "Business (I)"

Any thoughts or experiences to know if I should be worried about this? I am hesitant to just call United as it seems they don't have a lot of knowledge about their partner Aer Lingus and how to make things work. I am concerned they will screw up the trip, which starts in 1 week from today. Unless someone has other advice, I am leaning towards calling Aer Lingus reservations and ask what they are seeing for my flight.

Thanks in advance for any opinions / experiences.

I found some time to call Aer Lingus. They confirm they still show my original itinerary, including their segments in Business Class.
United.com continues to show it incorrectly as Economy class.

Still makes me nervous, but I will just show up and hope everything works out.

I would be interested if anyone else sees this type of glitch on partner awards.

Trying to remember the last time I had a partner award trip that didn't involve some type of glitch/drama/worry. :td:

I had trouble getting the EI segments to be found by the UA agent and added into my itinerary. She checked with her customer service and found that she needs to look for availability in the T bucket for Saver Y and U bucket for Saver C (not through her typical award searching). They then have to put the itinerary on hold for 48 hours to allow time for EI to ticket their segments. I have to call back in 24-48 hours to ticket it.

If you have trouble with agent trying to make it work, let them know the above.

I wish I found this out earlier when I was trying to get some trans-atlantic EI flights and the agent was telling me she could not see the availability I had online and gave up. If you get that message, then explain to them about the bucket mappings.

Help! Repeated ticketing issues with UA/EI
 

I am trying to reserve Saver award travel from NYC to Ireland. There are multiple qualifying flyings on the dates of my travel, but between Saturday and today I have now made three different reservations that don't get ticketed and when I call I am told they were cancelled (although online it still says they are pending confirmation from Aer Lingus and I never get any cancellation emails).

This is getting really frustrating, especially explaining it to the call center people. I've been on the phone about 3 hours in total today to no avail. No one knows why it was pending or cancelled and why these flights are all available online.

My current reservation is now one leg UA and one EI (I was hoping United would work "harder" on this one since only half of it is a code-share...)

Is there anything else I can do?

I did call Aer Lingus and gave them the confirmation code UA gave me for them, and they can only see cancelled reservations with no itineraries... How could that happen?

Sorry this is a RANT of sorts but it's been a very frustrating 12 hours.

(FYI, I am an award travel noob. This experience had put a bad taste in my mouth and I sort of want to stick to my Sapphire Preferred points going forward and be content with 20% off with points.)

Mods notified of cross-posting.

Last month I made a paid reservation to Ireland, connecting in London. Thus, I had Aer Lingus for a couple of the segments.

After making the reservation, I checked on this reservations for the next few days. The ticket was never issued. The reservation said "Not Ticketed". After 3 days, I called United reservations about the ticketing delay. The agent was surprised and researched what may be the problem.

Eventually, she found there was a discrepancy of $1 which was not allowing the ticketing to go through. They got my approval for the revised amount (IIRC it was a dollar more) and the reservation was ticketed.

I never was told if it was an Aer Lingus problem or United problem. My guess it is Aer Lingus, as I never had a problem with other code share flights. Since you have an award ticket, I'm not sure if this applies. My guess is that there may be a discrepancy on taxes/fees.

Thanks. Sometimes situations require their own threads and this is such a case. We hope that some members can provide some helpful advice, after which the thread may be merged into another thread.

Best of luck!

l'etoile
UA moderator

Admittedly it's been 2 years+ since my last EI award ticket reservation so YMMV, but there was some archaic system in place at the time where you had to call UA reservations who would set up the reservation and send it off to EI for confirmation - the agent said to call back in 24 hours to see if it had been confirmed

When i checked the UA website the following day the EI segment showed confirmed so I didn't bother calling UA back until approx 36 hours after the first call only to be told that the segment had been canceled and I should have called back to have the ticket issued :-(

Then the availability for my BHD-LHR segment disappeared and I ended up having to go BHD-LGW much earlier than originally planned so as to get up to LHR for my onward travel...

lesson: the description "confirmed" on the UA website with an EI segment doesn't mean it's ticketed - the agent explained that you actually have to call back again to get the ticket issued - ticketing is NOT automatically processed even if EI confirms the space

Aerlingus (EI) award booking experiences [Consolidated]
 

I could use some advice here. On united.com, I booked the following business class award:

LAX-IST-AYT,AYT-SAW-TBS,IST-DUB-LAX

All legs are on TK except DUB-LAX. When I booked on united.com, I got an email that said it could take up to 24 hours to confirm the DUB-LAX on EI. A couple of days later, I came back to united.com to find the reservation entirely gone with no warning, no email.

I called them and was told by two different reps that the EI leg was "unconfirmed". They told me that actually means "unavailable". It still shows as available on united.com.

I would be happy to sidestep EI, but I've searched and it's my only option to get back from IST on an award ticket in my time frame (early July 2016).

1) How does the EI award booking process really work?
2) How can I tell if an EI award is actually available?
3) Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Greg

It doesn't address the specific question, but there's often Ethiopian availabilty on DUB-LAX, a rather obscure route.