Questions and Answers

I snagged one of the Christmas day Etihad mistake fares from ORD-JNB for this October. After a schedule change on the ORD-AUH segment, I ended up changing the itinerary to prevent 22 hour layovers to ORD-DUB-AUH-JNB / JNB-AUH-ORD. ORD-DUB is codeshare with AA and AUH-JNB-AUH is codeshare with South African.

Everything was ticketed and fine for months–I have the PNRs for all three airlines and it was showing in all systems (I used checkmytrip.com to verify South African since their website won’t show bookings not made through them but they use Amadeus for their ticketing system).

However, I checked checkmytrip.com recently to find that the AUH-JNB-AUH segments magically disappeared. THat’s obviously a problem since that is South African’s (the operating carrier) system.

I called South African and they confirmed they no longer have my reservation. Looking in the history, they see it was there, but it was cancelled or removed due to irrops (what the agent told me).

Trying to get this fixed has been a nightmare. I have tried calling both South African and Etihad 4 times each and gotten nowhere. South African keeps referring me to Etihad as the ticketing carrier, and Etihad keeps saying the reservation is fine in their system and they can’t (won’t) do anything unless South African informs them the flight is cancelled (the flights still exist, we just don’t have them in our reservation any longer). I’ve tried emailing South African and calling Etihad at various times to get different call centers. Once I was promised an agent would followup with the schedule change department and get back to me, but nothing after a week and a half.

Any suggestions on what to do to get this nightmare resolved?

THanks very much.