O62

Leaving it until getting to OSL seems like the worst case as you'd be dealing with a scarcity of flights and baggage re-routing woes. Sounds like the LH people did well to rebook us all at once and check bags on the new itinerary.

Finding any award space last minute in J from SVG seems nearly impossible. SAS's ability to flexibly rebook seems like the better choice if it can be done.

zitsky

So not traveling until December 2023 and I think I should book in January 2023? I was playing with the website trying to get *some* idea of schedule for this year but it looks like everything is booked. At least I didn't see results trying to "book" with miles. Schedule is not great. One connection from RDU in IAH only had slightly more than 1 hour connection. I wouldn't mind an early flight if the connection was not bad, and it wasn't a 2 connection flight. Are business class tickets to South America still around 155,000 miles?

erwin123

Hi,

Yesterday, I tried to book following award for two persons on UA
28/12 : BRU - LHR (on SN) - BKK (on TG)
03/01 : BKK - MNL (on TG, excursionist perk listed at 0 miles and $20 tax)
15/01 : MNL-BKK (on TG) - MUC (on TG) - BRU (on LH)

Everything went through to the payment page (about $280 taxes needed to be paid).
It went through and got the PNR, but no eticket

Looking at the reservation, the segment MNL-BKK was listed twice, one of them was saying segment is cancelled, the other one looked ok.

As this could not be resolved online, I called the 1K line
First; the lady saw the incorrect segment and removed it. Then she said the MUC-BRU on LH segment appeared to be waitlisted (although online it looked ok, and on LH website it said confirmed)
Anyway, she did some things, and after about 25 minutes , the itinerary looked all OK with all segments confirmed.
She then said she needed to contact the rate desk, as it did not ticket automatically, she believed the BKK - MNL segment was not allowed and breaking tickiting, told that this was allowed on awards.
She put me on hold trying to contact the rate desk
for the next hour, I had the united hold music , every 15 minutes or so she told me she was still on hold with the rate desk

after that hour, the music stopped and no more updated from the lady, but the call did not disconnect
half an hour alter, somebody from the rate desk came on the call, saying that she would normally not deal directly with customer. She was surprised that the first lady of the 1K line was not on the call anymore
Anyway,she did decide to look at it
first thing she said, is that she needed to reconstruct the itinerary.
Took her about 20 minutes, then she said itinerary is OK for the same amount of miles as it was on the website
then she needed to calculate the taxes, but she did in USD . Because of that ticketing failed again as I was using Belgian credit card and address, so ticketing required it to be in Euro.
Took her about 15 minutes minutes to convert into Euro , just to come to the exact same amount of taxes as the online booking showed.
Eventually she was able to generate the etickets.
Only took 2,5 hours on the phone to get this fixed, for what seemed a straight forward multi-city award booking on the UA website.

Looked up all reservation on the thai website , and SN and LH websites. All looked OK, except that the UA frequent flyer card is not showing on thai , SN and LH (I will need this as i need the extra luggage as a star gold)
Will need to contact TG for this I guess, or wait till checkin
Was able to get seats only via the SN mobile app, as all other websites and apps (TG and LH) said I could not select seats
The seats I selected are now showing on SN, TG and LH reservations, so all looks OK.

Hopefully , this reservation will now stay intact till departure in 5 months.

lancelot21

Wow! A testament to the power of perseverance. Thanks for posting the story, as inspiration to not give up. Though knowing in advance that it can take the rates desk a couple hours to fix something relatively straightforward can be daunting. I recently took about 1-1/2 hours to resolve something seemingly straightforward on a paid ticket (how much to upgrade the outbound on a paid ticket with cash? I was waitlisted with PPs, so it stopped showing me a buy-up price).

cfischer

what the OP describes is far from straightforward if we want to be honest. The USD/EUR conversion alone is not something that is just SOP.

WineCountryUA

Not to be a downer but 4 TG flights and 1 SN, 5 months in advance will be a minor miracle to stay intact. The LH MUC-BRU also could change but LH will like have multiple options.

O62

Pretty much any change I've had to make with award flights (especially when I had lap infant tickets) required similar amounts of patience and insistence. Partner award itineraries require a special dedication.

JayhawkCO

I have a fun one going on right now too. Originally booked DEN-MIA-MGA with AA miles, but AA stopped flying to Managua (along with all the other US legacies). Since no OW airlines fly there, I canceled and rebooked DEN-IAH-SAL-MGA on UA/AV. Then Avianca stopped flying from IAH on Wednesdays. So then I changed the itinerary to DEN-DFW-SAL-MGA. Then Avianca stopped flying from DFW on Wednesdays (about a week later).

Yesterday I called in hoping they'd piecemeal me an itinerary together, DEN-IAH-PTY-MGA since I saw an itinerary including PTY-MGA for low miles (which previously had all been 40k+). Despite seeing saver inventory on everything, the agent couldn't book it. I told her I was still seeing DEN-CUN-PTY-MGA online for low miles, and she said she couldn't reproduce that. She told me that if I could book it online, to do so, and I did.

Unfortunately, I was unaware that Mexico doesn't have sterile transit, and so I'd much prefer sticking on UA for the first two flights. But now, since I booked a new itinerary, I can't get any agents to help out with the schedule change issues because the current itinerary hasn't been schedule changed (yet). I was hoping by calling within 24h, I could get someone to change it without too much headache, but alas, it's proving to be one.

O62

Unfortunately since you cancelled the other ticket, they have no obligation to offer you extra accommodation with your new ticket until (a) you find new availability or (b) the schedule changes substantially. In hindsight, I would have hung up and tried a different agent (or try a chat agent) to try to get the ticket changed to the desired itinerary that has availability, knowing they can open up DEN-IAH-PTY on their metal without problem, you just need space in the PTY-MGA segment.

JayhawkCO

Yeah, in retrospect. But I'm almost wondering if it's a married segment thing with CUN-PTY-MGA having saver space but not the flights individually. Every CM flight I had looked at since I booked this ticket originally (back in April) had always been 40k miles. The only 19.3k mile trips (which I paid) always had AV's SAL-MGA as the last leg.

I was in a hurry to get this one booked as a) it was the only itinerary I could find that didn't have an overnight flight and b) it got in a half an hour before the AV flight. I have 3:10 in CUN, so I'm hoping that should be plenty of time on a Wednesday to clear immigration in both directions and switch terminals. If not, that's what travel insurance is for, right?

O62

Could be! I've redeemed and searched for quite a lot of partner award trips over the past few years and award space is a weird, cryptic world that seemingly requires reading tea leaves to understand sometimes.

As to your connection, CUN is definitely a O&D focused airport but is usually decently efficient.