re: Avianca "Lifemiles" - Questions and Discussion
That's true, and a side-effect of this is that because the site found a flight combo for you instead of saying 'sold out', you no longer have that week-span of flight availability to check other nearby dates; you need to do a separate search for each date. It would be good if the next enhancement was some kind of 'my dates are flexible' feature in the search.
Overall though I'm tickled pink at this development.
One thing you can do is to try and find a date where there is no availability. Unless your searched route is super loaded with availability, I can't imagine that'd be too difficult. Another way is to search for First Class, since the availability of First is quite low (or on your chosen route, maybe impossible), it will almost certainly tell you "can't find anything, try another date". You can then change the class on the week display, and it will show you the availability in the class of interest.
In any case, with the "flexible" week display, you only get told if there is any option. You won't know what your options are until you check that specific date.
As also reported above, you can get that "superficiality" where a short sector in a higher class causes the entire booking to price at the highest class of service, even if the majority of the itinerary is in a lower class of service. A bit like the Qantas search bug we all love to hate. Nevertheless, I'd like to see if this gives some leeway on booking some itineraries which were unreasonably unavailable to book previously, e.g. European connectors to F services, or similarly connectors from Australia to F services in Asia.
Oooooooooooh, I wonder though if this will have implications for the screen-shot method of booking? Mixed class bookings don't replace the usefulness of the screenshot method for all-J routes, but I wonder if they'll start pushing back and saying 'you need to book through our website, there are flights available for the route you want'.
The screenshot method will still be interesting to use if you can find availability on the separate flights of interest, but not on the combined one and if you can show that there does exist other dates where the combined itinerary is certainly possible to book in one hit. I think if your demand is reasonable enough (no crazy **** like you could get away with on the old US programme), they might be obliging.
I also wonder what the baggage rules will be.
Same as always - governed by the rules of the carriers themselves, or, in the cases of mixed carriers in the same itinerary, the IATA guidance on the Most Significant Carrier.