obsyow

Good morning,

Tried to use Airmiles to book a WJ YOW-YQQ flight in July, with no availability.

Question is - any experience with WJ flights opening up for Airmiles closer to departure. The AirMiles agent seemed fairly certian that once avaiability is gone, seats will not become available approaching departure regardless of loads. Understand unlikley with summer season but any experiences with Airmiles seats becoming available at anytime of year?

Thanks

Shareholder

AIR MILES purchases the lowest category of WS seat on flights, so the agent is correct that once this batch of seats is gone, either having been sold to AM or regular customers, there are unlikely to be any further seats opened up. And July is peak summer travel season, so award seats as well as cheap revenue seats go quickly and well in advance.

Best way to determine if award seats will be available is to go to the regular WS booking site and enter the route and dates you're interested in. You will then see what price category seats are still available, and if there are seats in the lowest price category, then you can call AMs to book an award. If only high priced seats show, then those flights are pretty much off limits to AM,

obsyow

Thanks for the reply. I'm missing something though. The WS booking site appears to just show one fare at a time. If the travel date is further in the future than the current window for fare sales (currently to around the end of May) then the fare for YOW-YQQ is the same (slight differences based on the day of the week) whether the travel dates are in July, September or November. That is the November flight will have a reduced fare at some time closer to departure but how would one get anything less than the 'regular' fare for a flight on the WS booking site that is more than a few months out?

Cheers

robsawatsky

In short, all Westjet fares are "regular" unless they are "sale" fares, with "sales" being temporary special prices for a limited dates/destinations/advance purchase period/etc. The regular fare you see displayed will be the lowest available (cheapest category) for that flight at that moment. So, yes you may miss a sale by purchasing in advance but that doesn't necessarily mean those sale seats are a lower category than the one you bought they just may be cheaper because they are on "sale".

DanJ

So basically, you can't use the WS site to determeine Air Miles awards availability since you can't tell if the fare displayed is a lower or higher booking class.

It would be nice if this was the year Air Miles was referring to when they say "Over the next year we will have online booking capability".

StuMcIlwain

I have noticed at times that only certain WS flights are available for AM redemptions when all flights between the city pair are showing the exact same price on the WS website. So, yes, the WS website is not really of much use if you want to check availability for AM redeptions.

Hypnotize

That may just be one of those things that wasn't possible under our old reservation system. With our new system going into operation shortly, perhaps that's something you can look forward to?

DanJ

Air Miles deals with other airlines, so I don't think it's a shortcoming on WS' part that's holding AM back. After being in operation in Canada for almost 15 years, one would think they would be a little less "hokey" LOL.

Reason077

That is my experience too. Yesterday I was able to get an AM redemption flight YEG-YYZ for March 22, when the WS site was only showing expensive ($250+) flights. Other dates had much cheaper fares available, but no reward availability.

arf04

I agree that the WJ site is not useful to tell whether there are AM seats available. I booked a YQR-YYC-YQR trip for the 20th of Mar on the 17th and seatcounter was showing only 4 seats total available on every flight to and from YQR (with one exception that had a few more) but I was still given the option of seats at any time that I wanted.

momentum

Does "shortly" for the new res. system mean this decade or next? I understand from others its not going well again.

YellowJKT

I am by no means a frequent flyer like some of you here. But I've been building up AirMiles wherever I can get them lately. Eventually, I wanna get some tickets to Tampa, FL for a week or two in the dead of winter(February?) [shudders off the winter blues of late].

I am very curious to know if/when this supposed new WestJet booking site goes live.

I heard tell of it last year and thought it would be up by now. Granted I know making a large corporate website for thousands of visitors a day is no small task. If/when the new site has AirMiles integrated to it somehow, I would greatly appreciate it!