Now that we may be heading out of Covid and are booking on airlines that are not the usual suspects , I will mention an issue with Iberia. I found real difficulties in requesting seats.
My partner and i are travelling on the same PNR.
Despite having business class reward seats on a OWA booking , seats on Iberian metal were hard to select.( economy seats are not bookable without payment except for a few reasons eg status with Iberia)
Maybe I am cursed but this issue has occurred on 2 separate PNRs for mid 2022 travel.
Basically , I used the Qantas PNR and went to Iberia.com, selected my seat and then all of a sudden , all the remaining seats in the cabin turned into crosses - ie unavailable for selection - I got the seat but not my partner ! Nil helped. (Both my wife and I are same status).
I tried the BA website (after all, they are both in IAG), Royal Air Maroc and Royal Jordanian and the same issue happened.
There is no Iberia number to ring in Australia and initial attempts at international calls to Madrid ended in the line going dead after numerous messages saying that all agents are busy.
I tried the Iberia page on Facebook and one booking was fixed after about a week of messaging to and fro .Note that Iberia have their own unique 5 character Confirmation number - this was the initial problem- the reservation could not be accessed by my 6 bit QF alpha numeric one.
The seating for flight for September could not be fixed .
In the end , I tried the English speaking lines to UK and the USA - wait times ++. Gave up .
The flight with the problem was Madrid to London Heathrow . I had picked in particularly because it was scheduled to be flown by an Airbus 350 -900 ( anything is better than a A 320 with economy class seating with the middle one unoccupied). Of course , it may have reverted to the single aisle a/c by then but who knows .
I did try the USA number ( 00111800-772-4642 from Gold Coast) in the middle of their night and success after 30 minutes.
The excellent agent told me there was a "glitch" associated with bookings by airlines other than Iberia for bookings on Iberian metal where there was more than one person travelling- she said it was very important in that situation , NOT to change the seat request of the first one to be requested otherwise further seat selection will be frozen for additional travellers in that PNR.
What was the next move if the phone call did not work ? - a Twitter call ( max 280 letters and spaces ).
Apologies for the mundane nature of this post but this thread was looking a bit unused.
