Tagging on US Domestic legs to award flights

[bwhouse]

Hi all,

I had a weird experience the other day. I have been keeping an eye out for 2 J award seats from LAX-SYD (which seem to be really hard to come by these days) and I got an expertflyer alert so went online and sure enough VA2 had availability for 95,500 points each. I did a bit more searching as ideally I would have preferred to get back from Las Vegas, to my surprise searching LAS-SYD returned availability still at 95,500 each as it was only an extra 236miles so still in the 7,001-8,500 point band so went ahead and booked it online and was then presented with a confirmation number and a message saying there was an issue ticketing the flights and to contact Virgin. No worries I needed to call them anyway to book some EY flights as well.

The helpful lady I got through to said it was a glitch and the system shouldn't have let me book it as there was no availability on that flight. So offered to cancel the booking and refund my points and taxes to which I said no because I didn't want to loose the VA2 seats. I asked her to look for other options on the LAS-LAX leg, after about 20mins she finally found a Delta flight that had availability in Economy and offered to book that. However, after locking it in and re-costing it, the system wanted me to pay the extra 15,600 points for the delta flight, which the lady couldn't really explain. In the end, I gave up as I was running out of time so just locked in the VA2 flights.

My questions is, have people had luck tagging on domestic legs to award bookings? should I keep looking and call back up to try and get them to re-book it.

 

[serfty]

You best bet would have been with the initial call. It going to be a lot harder to change going forward, especially with the likely $60 pp change fee.

You can try but I would suggest just booking separately, allowing plenty of time for the connection.

 

[CPMaverick]

I haven't tried with Velocity points but I know with Delta Skymiles this can be extremely painful. Delta will restrict segments based on some complex logic, so you can't just string together different flights even if they have availability. I've seen it called 'married segment logic' and essentially there has to be an award available between your departure and destination in addition to individual flight availability. It is maddening.

Regardless of whether this is your problem or not, the LAX-LAS market is a leisure market and flights can be purchased quite cheaply in general. You might be better off booking in F for ~$200 and getting the 40 SC (or W and 30 SC).

 

[bwhouse]

Thanks guys. I did push pretty hard at the time, but after about 30mins of her searching to try and find a connection I decided it wasn't worth it as I knew the LAS-LAX leg could be had quite cheap.

Just seemed a little odd and I was curious if others had had any luck adding Delta domestic flights.