Qantas multi city page meaningless

[ausfox]

I spent a total of half a day working on a 280K award trip trying to get the multi city page to accept 6 flights.
It kept failing after 2 or 3 flights, indicating to start again. Yesterday I was able to select the flight times for my 6 sectors. I went to pay and was then told that there were no seats available "start again".
I spoke with the FF desk and was told that even though there are flights indicated as available on the multi city page, that does not mean that there are seats available.
If this is the case, why have the page there to research on?

 

[2infinity]

I've encountered the same thing. Super frustrating. I haven't gotten around to ringing the FF Call Centre, didn't feel like being on hold for 2 hours.

It's good to know that it crashes because there aren't actually any seats. Not good to know that the system will show you seats that don't exist. Surely it can't be that hard to only show available seats.

 

[BAM1748]

I've had it show seat available while clicking through the stop overs then fail at the end as well.

 

[equus]

The problem is not restricted to award tickets - it will fail on paid bookings as well, and even when seats are available.

I had one recently that would let flights be selected, would price out, and then when attempting to progress to payment, crashes out with a strange error.

After the initially unhelpful suggestion to ensure that all the "browser" compatibility checks were met, the second call centre agent was much more helpful and clued up. He advised that with less straightforward routings, although the web page can assemble the selection, and price each leg added to come up with a total, when you attempt to go to payment, the whole lot gets revalidated again by a different part of the system which can't handle everything and bombs out. He happily constructed the segments I was after, and got it all booked without charging the call centre fee.

 

[2infinity]

Just a thought about this situation. This could happen when you use the Award Flight Assist facility available through Australian Frequent Flyer, as they don't make the booking on your behalf, they only provide instructions on how to make your booking. It might give the service a bad wrap if users can't make the booking as suggested by AFA.

 

[ausfox]

The problem is not restricted to award tickets - it will fail on paid bookings as well, and even when seats are available.-------

Why does the planning stage allow/show seats in the required class when they are not available?
It accepted J to SIN when there were apparently none available.

 

[equus]

when they are not available

Defining not available is not necessarily so easy.

Depends on things like fare rules including construction limitations, point of sale etc., and then you have to start thinking about timing. What is available one second (or not), may change at the next instance, depending on who has booked what, and not necessarily just that fare bucket, or that flight as yield management algorithms could be continually adjusting what is presented.

Some sites may be looking at things local to the particular user - such as cookies, or even the PNR. JAL has been playing games where a fare bucket is available to any new PNR, but won't allow anything to be added to an existing PNR simply because that segment was previously in the PNR, and cancelled out.

 

[Deleted member]

We look elsewhere now. It’s all too hard

 

[JohnK]

Qantas had a fantastic award booking engine 10 years ago. Why did they feel the need to upgrade?

 

[dasheighty]

Ahhhhhh...simpler & fairer??????