I used to have all the problems that you mention above, but in the past 18 months I haven't had any of them and we have mixed bookings quite often. The PNR is the trick, the fact that Jarydd can view the VA flights on the QF website would suggest the travel provider uses Amadeus to book them. Just get the VA PNR off the itinerary and you should be able to check in as Sabre only needs its own PNR for this function.
OK - I understand your point about the VA PNR - my travel agent provides me with the separate VA, QF and ZL PNR's, the QF JQ and ZL PNR's all work fine on their respective web sites for seat selection and checkin. Our corporate travel agent uses Sabre (I think) - I can see existing bookings on Virtuallythere and Tripcase. Like
jaryd I can also see VA flights on the QF website if I have a mixed itinerary but obviously can't do seat selection or OLCI (fair enough).
My issue is that regardless of whether you are on the VA or the Velocity website - I can recover and see valid VA PNR's and bookings such as this:
So we know the booking exists in the Sabre and the VA world. But when it comes to the customer selecting the booking we see this:
Again - doesn't matter if its the VA or the Velocity web site - the result is still Eroor # 00193. About 2 years ago I complained to the VA rep on site about this and didn't receive much follow up about when/if this will be fixed. For me it has never been fixed.
They tried to blame our corporate travel agent but the bookings are always honoured, the PNRs are valid and my Velocity status points always credit correctly to my Velocity account, so given the choice between incompetence of our travel agent whom have been doing this for me for 5+ years or incompetence within the VA web team I know which one I'd put my money on. I have double checked with our corporate travel agent recently and she still has all my details correctly stored and they haven't changed in years anyway.
As for seat selection for a period of time my Velocity details were not passing through to VA from the TA and I couldn't do the seat selection so would call up. Now the TA puts my details in so it works and I can preselect seats for every flight. I've found the only way to really get it to work 100% is to have my Velocity number in the booking and accessing the booking through the Velocity website rather than through the VA "manage my booking" tab on the website. Don't ask me why this works, it drives me nuts but it does!
That's interesting that you have been able to get seat selection working through VFF login. I did think I might have the same issue years ago and tried your approach and so I tried recovering bookings on the Velocity web site with my VFF number - with the same result as above.
The VA and Velocity websites can be tricky as they are full of bugs, but once you work out the workarounds it becomes quite easy to use. The fact you have to use work arounds, well that is another story.... Good luck!
Understatement of the day! The bugs and permutations of inconsistencies are endless, thus so is the list of "workarounds" that people need to try. I did notice the endless loop of multiple login through Velocity also hasn't been fixed yet either, I have set a personal best today of being challenged 6 times for my Velocity Number and password in one web session whilst trying to select seats or look at bookings .
Oh and I run a very up to date generic clean Windows 8.1 & IE explorer vanilla PC setup in case any people suggest its a personal computer/device problem. Cheers.