Questions and Answers

Hi Lucky,

Firstly, great site. I love it! Wonderful trip reports and superb advice.

I’m attempting to snare 2 AAward J seats on QR from Eastern Europe home to Sydney in December 2016. The dates I want are now just coming into the 331 day window, so I’m desperately trying to snare seats for a very busy travel period. BA is showing some great availability from various European ports such as WAW, BUD, BEG to DOH and then from DOH on to SYD. When I call AA, they say they can see plenty of DOH-SYD availability but zero from any of the cities in Europe I’m asking them to check over a +3- day range. I’ve called twice so far (Australian number), a couple of hours apart and both agents say the same thing. Is this a known issue where BA shows open availability on QR but AA agents can’t see it? Or maybe just a temporary glitch? Thanks!

[USER=1512]@FFrustratedFirst[/USER] — Welcome! The BA tool does show phantom space for Qatar sometimes, it’s really annoying. I’d check the Qantas tool to see if the space is actually available. If so, then hold the long segment through AA, and then see if they can manually put in the flight numbers for the QR flights and see if that helps.

[USER=1512]@FFrustratedFirst[/USER] Worst case, see if you can just take the long segment and add economy connections. You can always bump them up when/if AA sees space.

Thank you both for taking the time to reply. Good to know for future reference about phantom QR availability on the BA tool. Tiffany’s advice to cross check QR availability on Qantas did the trick! I found a day with availability out of Warsaw. It was a bit touch and go when I called to book as the agent was muttering about Etihad not having availability. (???!!) But when I fed her the specific flight number I heard a penny drop and a few taps later she was able to book the two seats for me to DOH as well as the onward DOH-SYD leg. So I wonder if some agents are still unfamiliar with QR as an option when they plug cities into their system and just default to looking at EY when they hear a Middle Eastern transit. Just a hypothesis…

I had various plan B, C and D’s in mind – exactly like Gaurav suggested and could have tapped into QF points for EK flights to the Middle East. But fortunately in the end I found suitable flights, all in one PNR and not falling foul of the zone transit rules – which was my reason for not looking at EY options.

Now to wait days (or weeks) for ticketing. Aaahhhh AA. May your IT systems one day join the 21st century. May we one day be able to search and book online and have instant ticketing…one day.