QANTAS/ONE WORLD INTERLINE BOOKING PENALTY

[Mattyana2003]

I'm constantly trying to book multi city flights on Cathay from Brisbane to Europe or Asia via HKG which I think they call an interline ticket. I get right to the end of the booking process and it flakes out back to the error page.
I've spoken to Qantas many times about it and they know it's a glitch but they always tell me to do two separate bookings. The problem with this is that if I want to cancel or change the tickets if some better class ticket comes available I then have to pay the 6000 point change fee on two bookings rather than just on one costing me 12,000. One person at Qantas suggested that I should ring up AFTER the two separate bookings are made and put a note on my booking file about what had happened in case I want to cancel/change the ticket for 6000 instead of 12,000.
Does any one have any experience with his?

 

[Mattg]

I believe your issue is married segments...

This is done intentionally by Cathay for various reasons. Basically, the solution is to either make separate bookings or stop in Hong Kong for more than 24 hours to get the flights on one ticket.

The problem won't happen with all Cathay flights. If you can get flights to come up on a point-to-point search (i.e. Brisbane to London, with CX via HKG showing in the results) then you should have no problems booking everything on one booking.

 

[mannej]

Cathay and Married Segments, it isn’t a glitch it’s intentional.

 

[Danger]

Cathay and Married Segments, it isn’t a glitch it’s intentional.

I think the website problem is a glitch, though. Surely the booking engine should be able to accommodate married segments when spitting out flight options, rather than only failing at the payment stage.

On the topic of CX and its love of married segments, I saw a funny one earlier this week. There was no award availability HKG-LHR but there was HKG-xLHR-ZRH.