Adam Smith

I had another WS/AF itinerary recently. When I tried to do seat selection through WS, it warned me I could only ever do seat selection once, which was fine, because I just wanted to lock in my aisle seat.

When I went to check in, I was in 3A - definitely not what I had selected previously. I can't remember whether I chose 2C, 2D, 3C, or 3D, but I would never have chosen 3A for that flight. I'm assuming it never saved my seat selection when I did it before and 3A is just whatever was open when I went to check in. So yet another failure.

I haven't flown the return yet, and I can't see my seat assignment for the WS leg (and I haven't bothered to have an agent look it up), but the cabin is sold out and 3A is the only seat not occupied, so what do you want to bet I'm going to end up in 3A on the way back too?

arf04

Interesting data point. We recently had a KL/WS itinerary and when I was finally able to get a BP I discovered that we were in 1AC when I know we had not preselected those seats as the flight was on the Q400 and it can be a pain to find space in the bins for all our stuff due to no seat in front. I wondered if the seat selection had not taken originally, but generally this has not been an issue before.

YXUFlyboy

While we're at it, why can I only do seat selection once? That seems crazy to me. And it's the same if you book on non-WS ticket stock and have a WS leg, you can select your seat once. Then you have to call. Seriously?

Adam Smith

As expected, I ended up in 3A for the return of the itinerary I mentioned previously. So it seems the seat selection no longer gets saved. Which is very frustrating, because this did actually work just a couple of months ago.

It seems that now you can do seat selection zero times, since it doesn't work.

V1213

Adding to this list of partner booking failures, my current quandary relates to a Qantas ticket for travel Canada-Australia-Canada with QF codes on WS-operated flights within Canada.

I can log into the booking on westjet.com using the QF (Amadeus) PNR, and see the WS (Sabre) PNR there. As expected, online seat selection is not available. Notably, only the return WS leg shows up on the website - the outbound (first) WS leg is missing, with the first QF flight showing as the first flight of the itinerary.

Upon calling WS Platinum Line to sort out the seat selection, they can do the return WS leg no problem. However, the outbound leg is showing up on the Sabre itinerary as 7 instances of the same flight, all unconfirmed. By adding the PNR to TripCase I can see that the Sabre eticket is correct, but the Sabre itinerary has this peculiarity. Despite calling WS Platinum twice, and the agents speaking to the Help Desk both times, supposedly WS can't do anything about it - QF apparently needs to fix this. Unsurprisingly, a call to QF says the booking looks fine and normal on their end and that WS would need to fix anything causing issues on their end. Despite getting nothing fixed, I'll note that both airline call centres were friendly and wished me luck sorting it out with the other airline...

Since this is the very first leg, and I'm not the one travelling, I'm not keen to leave this to hopefully be sorted out during check-in.
I'm getting nowhere with either airline - any suggestions as to which airline actually has the ability to fix this, or other ways forward?

Adam Smith

Sounds somewhat similar to an experience I had a few months ago. Not sure whether you recall the post, but after getting a similar runaround, when I went back to WS and insisted that everything was 100% correct on the OAL end (AF in that case), and that they were 100% certain the issue was at WS, someone at the WS support desk "manually" fixed the PNR to match AF. Although that first WS being missing is different from what I went through, so I'd be a bit more concerned.

Given that the issue has always been on the WS end in my experience, I'm inclined to look in their direction again. But to be clear, the Amadeus PNR doesn't have any of these unconfirmed (UN status) segments still on it? If you can check (I'm not sure whether TripCase would be able to see these), or have a QF agent check (they would definitely be able to see), that everything is clean on their end, I'd probably call WS again and insist that they fix it.

Adam Smith

Another challenge of WS + partner bookings. For some reason, WS's DCS system hates DL BPs. With the increasing emphasis on serving DL hubs, this often creates a mess at the gate as the GAs try to get pax with DL-issued BPs to come and get new WS BPs. Or people try to board with their DL BPs and have to get sent to the desk.

I did a BOS-YYC last year where there was an absolute cluster even though BOS is a focus city for DL rather than a hub, and it was shockingly bad on a recent trip to AUS, which is barely a focus city for DL. I somewhat understand DL connections in BOS, but have no idea why there were so many people connecting in AUS, which mostly just has service to DL hubs and isn't really a logical connection point from most places that DL serves other than maybe MCO.

I can only imagine, at a DL hub like DTW or ATL, how bad this is.