Oneworld Classic Flight Reward Discussion - The Definitive Thread

[Kangol]

I had an issue with married segment, but after directing the csr that each was available as seperate segments, I was able to get it put up to supervisor level and they were able to book it under a invol reroute.

Involuntary reroute - creative! Interesting how they'd get around the lack of point to point availability..

 

[madrooster]

Involuntary reroute - creative! Interesting how they'd get around the lack of point to point availability..

It's the wrong way to do it. The airline involved can still cancel the seat on you, even after ticketing. I've seen CX and QR do exactly that.

 

[Kangol]

It's the wrong way to do it. The airline involved can still cancel the seat on you, even after ticketing. I've seen CX and QR do exactly that.

That's what I'd be afraid of. Airlines releasing seats is a different story. Reader beware.

 

[Radio8tiv]

It's the wrong way to do it. The airline involved can still cancel the seat on you, even after ticketing. I've seen CX and QR do exactly that.

this has me a little worried now, I have had sooo many changes (additions, and dropped flights) and different csr playing with my trip I'm not sure if what I have is going to work. My trip has been ticketed now for about 2 months but I don't fly out till Nov, not only do I have a few invol reroute(about 5) I also have a few different ticket numbers (2 for the main passenger, 3 for the secondary passenger) it's all a bit of a mess, but since it's my first 280k I thought that's how it was done.
Any advice to insure this will all work would be greatly appreciated (happy to PM the trip booking ref if need be)

 

[madrooster]

this has me a little worried now, I have had sooo many changes (additions, and dropped flights) and different csr playing with my trip I'm not sure if what I have is going to work. My trip has been ticketed now for about 2 months but I don't fly out till Nov, not only do I have a few invol reroute(about 5) I also have a few different ticket numbers (2 for the main passenger, 3 for the secondary passenger) it's all a bit of a mess, but since it's my first 280k I thought that's how it was done.
Any advice to insure this will all work would be greatly appreciated (happy to PM the trip booking ref if need be)

PM me the booking ref and passenger names as verification and I'll have a look at the full PNR history. Inexperienced QF agents have a habit of issuing as invol reroute when it's the wrong thing to do and not escalating appropriately.

When I say wrong, I mean wrong in terms of procedure as it causes more grief later on eg. seats getting cancelled, changes to the itinerary requiring full manual tax calculations, refunds not going through automatically (and then taking weeks for manual processing) etc.

I had a 280k PNR which had a grand total of 1164 changes logged in the PNR history. Now that's what you call a mess...

 

[CaptainCurtis]

Is east to west travel a requirement or is Perth - Kuala Lumpur - London - LAX - NYC - Hong Kong - Sydney okay?

 

[grussellt]

This award is distance based and doesn't need to be configured as RTW as long as you meet all other requirements. You should be fine on that routing but you can do a dummy run (multi-city) to test it.

 

[XeroChance]

Is east to west travel a requirement or is Perth - Kuala Lumpur - London - LAX - NYC - Hong Kong - Sydney okay?

As mentioned by grussellt, it doesn't need to be E->W. Presuming you want PER-KUL direct, if you intend on doing a dummy booking keep in mind you can't search Malaysia Airlines availability on Qantas, thus its best to substitute it for a nearby city like Singapore.

When I was looking for SYD-KUL, I used British Airways Executive Club program to look up availability, but for my dummy bookings I tested using SYD-CGK(Jakarta) because Singapore had low availability (yes! even with 1x BA and 2x SYD and multiple options via other Aus cities).

 

[grussellt]

If you want to test the distance (without availability) you can use ITA which is a very useful tool.

 

[XeroChance]

gcmap works well too for finding distance in miles and the mapping facility is quite popular with flight bloggers.

 

[footy99]

gcmap works well too for finding distance in miles and the mapping facility is quite popular with flight bloggers.

I use mileage monkey. There are a few handy tools around.

This is a bit generic but does anyone have a standout oneworld airline for business class? I have an awful lot of options for getting from Doha to the US (any initial port is fine - PHX is the final destination) and am not particularly constrained on time or mileage so figured I would shoot for the best product.

 

[exceladdict]

I use mileage monkey. There are a few handy tools around.

This is a bit generic but does anyone have a standout oneworld airline for business class? I have an awful lot of options for getting from Doha to the US (any initial port is fine - PHX is the final destination) and am not particularly constrained on time or mileage so figured I would shoot for the best product.

I don't think you'll be disappointed by QR. My TR below (21 flights) has DOH-IAH which is both my longest and most comfortable flight of all time, on their 772 (I'm yet to fly 'real' first class).

 

[footy99]

I don't think you'll be disappointed by QR. My TR below (21 flights) has DOH-IAH which is both my longest and most comfortable flight of all time, on their 772 (I'm yet to fly 'real' first class).

Cheers. Yeah Doha to LAX is a nice long possibility, similar to that. I've tried some of their shorter flights to Europe and Nepal but never a big one like that.

 

[Daver6]

I use mileage monkey. There are a few handy tools around.

This is a bit generic but does anyone have a standout oneworld airline for business class? I have an awful lot of options for getting from Doha to the US (any initial port is fine - PHX is the final destination) and am not particularly constrained on time or mileage so figured I would shoot for the best product.

QR is the stand out for me. Not flown JAL though.

 

[XeroChance]

What are people's experience with having longer than standard layovers? From my many many searches on Qantas and BA, I seem to be prevented from accessing flights where I connect at transit city overnight, and this may or may not result in a Qantas agent screaming at me (from experience about segment stitching).

Might be better if I explain with an example;
I'm hoping to go from YYC (Calgary) - LHR (London) - HEL (Helsinki).
Heading to Helsinki will allow me to experience the various (CX, AA, BA, QF (hopefully open by then)) lounges at Terminal 3 Heathrow.

YYC-LHR BA102 lands in London at 12:10PM, giving me connecting options at 4:10PM, 6:05PM, or 7:25PM on Finnair or British Airways, arriving from 9:00PM-12:05AM.
I know that Finnairs AY1332 departs at 10:30AM is scheduled with an A350-900, which alot better than A321/A320 products that Finnair/BA normally use on European flights.

Landing at 12:10PM, and departing at 10:30AM the next day is a layover of only 21hrs 20mins, just under the 24hr OneWorld layover definition, as well as avoiding a Helsinki arrival at night.

However this connection doesn't come up anywhere. Anyone have any experience with forcing long layovers?

 

[Radio8tiv]

What are people's experience with having longer than standard layovers? From my many many searches on Qantas and BA, I seem to be prevented from accessing flights where I connect at transit city overnight, and this may or may not result in a Qantas agent screaming at me (from experience about segment stitching).

Might be better if I explain with an example;
I'm hoping to go from YYC (Calgary) - LHR (London) - HEL (Helsinki).
Heading to Helsinki will allow me to experience the various (CX, AA, BA, QF (hopefully open by then)) lounges at Terminal 3 Heathrow.

YYC-LHR BA102 lands in London at 12:10PM, giving me connecting options at 4:10PM, 6:05PM, or 7:25PM on Finnair or British Airways, arriving from 9:00PM-12:05AM.
I know that Finnairs AY1332 departs at 10:30AM is scheduled with an A350-900, which alot better than A321/A320 products that Finnair/BA normally use on European flights.

Landing at 12:10PM, and departing at 10:30AM the next day is a layover of only 21hrs 20mins, just under the 24hr OneWorld layover definition, as well as avoiding a Helsinki arrival at night.

However this connection doesn't come up anywhere. Anyone have any experience with forcing long layovers?

I have four <24 hour transits in my upcoming trip (DOH HEL TXL and BNE), I didn't have too many problems with getting them put through although at times I did need to educate the csr about the difference between transits and stopovers. Just put each leg through separately in the multi city tool at Qantas when searching for these flights (and obviously input it as the next day)
Married segment control as far as I'm aware (I'm no expert) does not apply when using different carriers so in your example using BA and AY should be no issue

 

[jaybeedee]

I'm starting to build my itinerary with dummy bookings and I can get a reasonable anount of availability, but if I try and ticket it or go back to change dates I have to re-enter everything.

How do people do the planning - just try dummy bookings for lots of individual segments and take notes, or try and book the full itinerary ?

In terms of changes can one (either through the call centre or through the website) go back and insert intermediate cities. In my case we want to go rome-MAdrid with a couple of weeks in spain and then Athens. I can see availability for FCO-MAD and MAD-ATH, I would like to look at maybe some internal flights within spain but I would prefer to lock in the main legs and then come back and play around with the choices. Is this possible ? I am WP so I think I am only up for the change fee , not the assistance fee.

It seems reasonable availability in J in the northern hemisphere, but I am struggling with QR in and out of Doha (we want to visit my brother and just about every routing offered involves EK). I am assuming getting to and from NZ to the US will be the tightest segments.

Thanks to all the contributors to the thread.

 

[exceladdict]

It seems reasonable availability in J in the northern hemisphere, but I am struggling with QR in and out of Doha (we want to visit my brother and just about every routing offered involves EK). I am assuming getting to and from NZ to the US will be the tightest segments.

Thanks to all the contributors to the thread.

Are you using BA to look for the QR space? Much easier than QF which fills up with EK.

 

[BenG]

Hi All,

I've been planning out a OWA trip, using plenty of advice and information from this post over some months now (and really very appreciative of the information gleaned from all of you who have posted before me). I'm planning out a 4x140k in Y plan for myself and the whole family for the end of this year and in to January next year with the current plan being (and only recently fairly settled upon):

BNE-LHR, Surface Sector to BCN, BCN-JFK, EWR-DFW-LAX, LAX-SFO, SFO-BNE

It has been challenging and as the trip will finish around 26/1/18 I was interested to see AA availability show up for the US segments on the dates we are looking at, which has been in the last few days.

Today I checked in again to make sure what I had found last night was still ok and found that I could no longer see any AA availability, so figuring I had missed out the dates we wanted, I checked around those dates and still nothing, so I started to try things as just single segments just to find what was available. I've now looked at the BCN-JFK (My plan was AA for that), EWR-DFW and DFW-LAX legs and no availability. I've since tried many different dates through May, Jun, July,August etc this year right up until our planned timeline back in mid Jan 2018, I'm not seeing any availability for any AA for any US route I've dreamt up or on any dates. I contacted Qantas for a manual search and they are not showing any availability either, seems to me like all AA seats are not available for booking at all. Even with "Flexible with dates" checked all I get is "We are unable to find recommendations from the airlines we search. Please change your search criteria and resubmit the search. (# 66002)"

I've been searching on and off using various earlier dates just for planning purposes in the last 4-6 months I suppose trying different things, but pretty much all of those contain AA segments and have not come across this before. The CSR I contacted was very much of the mind that "it is what it is" but did suggest she would escalate it internally, which is something I suppose, and I understand that things do change and availability is not guaranteed minute to minute, but with my admittedly very limited knowledge still, it seems like something is amiss.

Not sure if anyone else can see any AA availability or if its just me, or if this is something that happens, or maybe I'm just losing my mind from re-inputting flight details in to the multi-trip form too many times.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[exceladdict]

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Have a look on the AA site for availability. Could be a QF/AA system issue, or AA might be doing some sort of broader change