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.

Thanks...I did look for that, but it's not available on my dates.

There should be tons of bookings available via IST to the East Coast, and then IAD or EWR to LAX. Book the non-preferred option, and then switch when better flights pop up.

Aerlingus Award Problems
 

Aer Lingus is EI, not IE. Just FYI.

Sorry for the dyslexia...yes IE is Internet Explorer.

Resolution
 

I'm still not clear on the processes, but here is what happened:

1) Built reservation on united.com; it did not ticket and just disappeared

2) Called premier line a few days later and got an off-shore agent. After about 40 min. and much hold-while-I-consult, she rebuilt the itinerary in the same record (which still existed, but had no flights). When she got to the EI flight, she said it was "unconfirmed" which meant that it was not available. She proceeded to explain to me how airlines manage award inventory...irritating. After the call, the flights were back, but disappeared shortly thereafter.

3) I re-built the itinerary on united.com with a new record. I immediately called in to ask about confirming the EI flight. Got a US rep who also said it was unconfirmed, meaning unavailable. When I asked why it showed as available on the web site, she transferred me to web support. I waited for 20 minutes on hold and then got disconnected.

4) The record still showed the flights so I called a little later to try one more time. The US-based rep claimed 20 years of experience, but was not familiar with the EI booking. She was suspicious of whether 'U' was the correct fare class for an EI business award. After some research, she determined that it is. The then proceeded to "re-sell" the seat. The red text in my online itinerary was replaced by black text saying something else. Unfortunately, I failed to record either of theses messages. Early this morning, it ticketed.

That was easy!

I still wish that I know more about what happened, but here are my observations:
1) You WILL need human intervention. It may be best just to do the whole award on the phone, but if you do build it online, you MUST call!
2) Many of the reps, even experienced ones, are unfamiliar with EI award bookings. HUACA!
3) Don't count you chickens until they are ticketed!

I guess that these are pretty obvious bits of general FT wisdom and I let myself get a bit complacent when doing the original booking.

If anyone can shed more light on the process and the meaning of re-selling the seats, it might be helpful for other people, who will then be better equipped to hand-hold the UA phone reps.

Booking held award
 

I was looking last night for a trip we are taking and I found award space for 2 business seats from MCO-DUB-LGW. I needed to check with my wife so I put the tickets on hold.

Questions.
With a reservation on hold, can I be sure it will book? I'd hate to transfer the UR miles and then error out.

Can I call to see about changing from DUB-LGW to the LHR flight instead?

Can I call and pay for one ticket out of my wife's account of miles and one ticket from mine?

I'd be ok to pay the phone fee if these are something that can be done. I'd just hate to stuck with 140k United miles and not be able to book the ticket. Thanks!!

How, exactly, did you put these tickets "on hold"?

If you don't have enough miles in your MileagePlus account to ticket an award there will be an option to put the award on hold.

To be honest, I would make no promises that the MCO-DUB-LGW will ticket — I figure 5% chance UA claims that their partner EI didn't really have the space and leaves you holding a pile of miles. I think if that did happen, you'd be able to escalate to a supervisor who might be able to force open UA space on something like MCO-EWR-LHR and book a similar trip at the originally agreed-upon mileage price.

So you "farelocked" it?

If so cancel the booking and rebook on what you want.

Only if award space is available. Canceled award inventory does not necessary re-appear.

Before the hold expired at midnight, I called United.
I did receive an email today saying. ​​​​​​​​

We have requested confirmation of your flights from Aer Lingus. This process may take up to 24 hours. We will notify you via email upon confirmation.
This reservation is not ticketed. Pending confirmation fr​​om Aer Lingus.

I asked if they could look into my reservation to see what the problem was before I transferred my miles to complete the booking. After a short wait, the representative confirmed that the space isn't actually there. I thanked him for saving me from wasting my time in trying to complete the booking.

The flight wasn't until next September and I already have a backup on BA First with AA miles. While I am looking forward to that flight, I'd be glad to rebook without the fees.

Data Point:
After cancelling the held reservation, the space showed up again on the EI flights. I had enough points to book one ticket. I went ahead and booked. The reservation ticketed after about 1 hour. However after that, the second seat disappeared.

I waited up until 23 hours and still no space for 1 more ticket so I cancelled the first booking within the 24 hour window. Shortly after my miles were redeposited, the space for 2 tickets showed up again. I confirmed the space by looking on Expertflyer for business class space on EI.

I rolled the dice and transferred enough Chase Ultimate Reward points for the second ticket into the account. I went and selected the flights and crossed my fingers.

Less than 30 minutes later, I received the email that my reservation was ticketed. Score!

The satisfaction of having this work will only be supplanted by the 8 hour layover I built in to the booking so we can go into Dublin and have lunch at Temple Bar.

On 11/13 called BA to book award flight on EI. Expertflyer and United both showed 2 U-class tickets available for DUB>BOS. The agent confirmed he saw the seats available too but when we went to book the award Aer Lingus' system wouldn't confirm. The BA agent tried to override it but couldn't. He said that Aer Lingus had an antiquated system and to make matters worse they are in the process of changing computer systems so booking flights on EI have been a nightmare the past couple of weeks. He told me to call back in a week. After the call, I checked Expert Flyer and the award seats were gone.

I called back the next day 11/14 after noticing the award seats were showing up again on Expertflyer and United. This time a female agent at BA was able to make it through the booking process, take my credit card payment for taxes and issue me a BA confirmation number. She said I would receive an email confirmation shortly.

On 11/15 I noticed I hadn't received an email confirmation and the flight was not showing up on my BA Exec Club itinerary and my Avios were still there. I called BA again and the agent initially couldn't find the flight. When I gave him my confirmation number he was finally able to see it and saw that my credit card transaction did go through, but that Aer Lingus has not "accepted" the booking yet. The agent spoke with his supervisor and the supervisor recommended I wait two more days for Aer Lingus to confirm and withdraw my Avios.

Update: 11/17 Got a call from British Airways saying Aer Lingus couldn't run my credit card to finish the award booking."No worries, all is fine, your seats are still safe but I just need your number again." This is funny since I called my credit card company and they said that the original credit card transaction was authorized so they shouldn't need to rerun the card. Still no ticket confirmation.

I'm trying to book a couple of one-way J awards SFO>DUB, but they never ticket because of some kind of problem, possibly a technical snafu between UA and EI. I'm looking to travel mid-June 2016, and there appears to be good availability on several dates via LAX, then onto DUB via the EI nonstop.

The very helpful UA representative with whom I spoke said the problem might magically resolve itself, but I'm skeptical.

Does this happen regularly between UA and its non-*A partners? Is this "phantom inventory," as I've heard sometimes occurs with LH F, or will I really get the seats once the glitch sorts itself out?

Moved you post to this thread as booking with EI has some checked history. This could be phantom inventory but based on the recent posts it seems it is system interfacing issues.

It happens with UA and *A partners too.

UA's technology sucks. You never know what it's going to do to you.

I did see it once with an SK booking, but otherwise I've never had problems with *A awards ticketing promptly on the half-dozen different *A airlines I've booked with UA miles.

Here's hoping it gets sorted out soon. In the meantime, if anyone has personal experience with a strategy -- for example should I HUACA until I find an agent willing to contact EI on the phone while I wait? -- I'd be grateful.

I wish that were the case for me.

I've had flights not ticket, segments just drop off months after ticketing, and I had a nice one yesterday, where on a change on a 2-pax PNR, it confirmed, sent me a receipt for both pax, but when I couldn't load the reservation immediately thereafter, I checked the receipt, and one of the ticket numbers was the old ticket, so it really ticketed 1 of 2 pax on the same PNR. :rolleyes:

UA's systems are broken. Take nothing for granted. It's funny because when I buy a DL or AS ticket, I don't go back immediately and load it to view it. I trust that clicking purchase and getting an email, I'm done. With UA, I audit the receipt to make sure it's the price I agreed to (I've been charged more, or a credit hadn't been taken off as advertised), I go back to the res to make sure it's viewable (I've had it where it isn't), I verify the receipt and res have all the segments (occasionally they don't), I check the CC to make sure the amount authorized matches what I paid, and I check the reservations at least weekly to make sure they're in tact. I don't do any of this with other airlines, but with UA it's necessary.

My philosophy when dealing with or flying United is that you don't know for sure what's going on until the plane is in the air. I used to say you don't know what's going on until the door closes, but I actually had a segment drop post-pushback once, and takeoff was delayed when the pax count didn't match. They were able to reconcile and fix it with a minor delay, but it's scary how bad the systems are at United Continental Holdings, Inc.

Totally hear ya. I'm probably just lucky because I have 1/30th the flights and FT posts you do. ;) But again, if anyone has concrete, real-world suggestions to get this ticketed, I'd be grateful.

Anybody having luck booking business class Aer Lingus lateley? I see tons of availability all summer (LAX to DUB) but the booking is not confirmed by UA after waiting a day or two. Any recent luck for anyone or tricks? Or is the availability showing on UA totally bogus?

Wanted to share my lousy experience booking an EI award flight through United. Wanted a flight from DUB>LHR>SFO on United first, the first leg is an economy hopper on EI. I made the reservation on United's site and got the "You must wait 24 hours for Aer Lingus to confirm availability" message. Here is a timeline of what happened next:

0 Hours - Submitted the reservation
24 Hours - Called United as I still had no email - agent called EI and after 20 minutes advised Aer Lingus still confirming the flight, I would have to wait another 24 hours
42 Hours - Get an email from United that the flight could not be confirmed, call us for more options
46 Hours - Called United again, got a rep who wanted to sell me another flight on a completely different route. Advised I wanted my original itinerary, expertflyer still showed 7 award seats on the DUB>LHR leg so she called Aer Lingus and confirmed there were plenty of seats. She then told me she "re-sold" or "sold" the seats (was hard to understand what exactly she did), but I would have to wait 24 more hours for EI to confirm the seats.
72 Hours - Still nothing on the site, and no emails so I called back and this time the agent ONCE AGAIN called EI (another 20 minute hold) to confirm availability, and the agent was then finally able to ticket the itinerary successfully. I called EI directly after this and confirmed they had my reservation and that it was ticketed. The United site now showed my ticketed itinerary with receipt as well.

Personally I think this might be a glitch with United's web based booking system, either it is putting the reservation in with the wrong class, incorrect taxes/fees or something similar. I would be interested to hear if anyone has luck booking the reservation initially by phone instead of using the United site. But I would definitely recommend calling at exactly 24 hours to have the reservation ticketed, that seems to be a requirement.

FWIW, I booked the SFO>DUB>LHR flight on EI using BA Avios over the phone, and they were able to book AND ticket the flight instantly with no wait whatsoever. I guess they have a better relationship with EI than United does if EI makes United awards wait 24 hours to confirm availability?

Aer Lingus and BA are both owned by IAG, and the new Aer Lingus loyalty program is based on Avios, so it's probably a good bet that they have a better relationship.

Follow up - Continuing issues
 

Back in November I posted my frustrating experience of booking UA award on EI where the reservation would auto-cancel after about 24 hours. Finally after a long call, they did some magic and it ticketed. Happy, with a ticket number, I went on my way.

Last week I called EI for seats and they did not see my DUB-LAX leg. They could see the other flights on the itinerary (eg IST-DUB on TK). They told me to call UA. I called UA and they said they had to push the ticket and said it was done. The next day I call back EI with the same result, they say "wait another day". I did, called back and same thing with EI...I'm not on DUB-LAX.

Another hour on the phone with UA, who calls EI...they can't work it out. Finally, I get a supervisor that tells my that EI does not pull award tickets into their system until some (unspecified) time closer to flight. She offers to open award space on DUB-EWR-LAX.

I don't want DUB-EWR-LAX because: a) It's 3 segments from IST to LAX rather than two and b) I don't want to fly UA BF, I want EI business. She tells me that I should hold onto my EI reservation and try again within 30 days of flight. She said that UA will open space for me if EI leaves me out in the cold. I'm pretty sure that UA has to, since I have a ticket with them.

Questions:
1) Does the supervisors explanation make sense?
2) Should I play it safe and take the less desirable option or hold out?
3) Anything else that I should do?

Thanks,

Gregas

In my experience EI was able to see my ticketed reservation immediately after UA told me it was ticketed. I called EI at 516-622-4222 and gave them the EI PNR starting with 2 (which differs from UA's PNR). They were able to see my reservation and confirmed the correct ticket number from UA starting with 016, for a flight 5 months out. If I wanted to I could have selected seats for a fee too. If they do not have your PNR and cant see an attached ticket number starting with 016, something is wrong and your seat on that plane won't be reserved. I got lucky and found a US rep one night when I called about 11:30PM who finally was able to get this fixed for me. I would recommend a HUCA spree until you get someone who sounds like they know whats going on - I think what would probably be best is for them to re-ticket the reservation with a brand new ticket number and push that to EI.

And for anyone else thinking of booking an EI flight via UA, I wouldn't recommend it at this point. Its a very sketchy experience and you could find yourself without a ride at the last minute.

Issues booking award flight
 

There's an open route that I see for this summer that's on Aer Lingus and it looks like there is plenty availability but every time I make a reservation, it kicks me back out the next day and doesn't ticket me. Does anyone have any experience with this? I tried calling and they say they see it open but they can't book it right away.:confused: