Questions and Answers

This is the second time I have had problems with booking award travel on Cathay Pacific through Alaska. I was wondering if you have any insight?

I use Award Nexus to monitor availability using the British Airways site. Availability will appear in my notification. I double check it by going to the BA site. I call Alaska, but they cannot see the availability.

I [U]call[/U] American, and they can see it. I can check online at other partners, such as Qantas, and they can see the availability, but Alaska cannot.

I had an “F” open seat taunting me for WEEKS. Every day it would appear as described above. I would call Alaska, and they couldn’t see it. I finally spoke to a supervisor, who checked with the IT department to make sure the links to Alaska were working properly… and they were.

I eventually wrote to the Marco Polo club, and they were either ignorant or evasive. In a nutshell they simply said to check with Alaska.

Today, I had another award appear, and have now run into the same thing. Everyone but Alaska can see it.

So I my question is… has Cathay ended it’s partnership with Alaska? Or are they treating them as second-class partners?

I’m not sure if CX is one of the airlines that always see 1 seat less than what’s available for AS. It could be a glitch of some sort on AS’s side.

I dont think calling Marco Polo will do anything since they cant control what AS sees

The partnership is definitely not over since I booked an F award through AS a couple of weeks ago. However, as [USER=29]@David W[/USER] mentions, AS often only has access to a subset of inventory. Not sure if there are any workarounds. [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER]?

I think there is something going on with AS access to CX inventory, yes, but they are still partners.

In general, [USER=29]@David W[/USER] is right that AS seems to be able to see one fewer seat than is available to other partners. This is a glitch (it’s happened at various points with EK, QF, etc.,) but not policy (with Fiji Airways inventory, it’s policy). So there may not be much you can do in the interim other than finding dates with two seats.

As a side note — there’s not much point in verifying Award Nexus results with the British Airways site if that’s also what you’re using to search. You’ll want to check against the JAL tool to make sure it’s not phantom space.

Thanks for sharing thoughts! 🙂

[QUOTE=”Tiffany, post: 18183, member: 7″] So there may not be much you can do in the interim other than finding dates with two seats.[/QUOTE]

The J seats I saw today showed 2 available. I ended up reserving a seat through MPC, and now the BA site shows 1 seat available.

I also am a bit skeptical of this two-seat theory because last year I would often book F seats with only 1 showing on BA. It was always a mad dash to call Alaska or American so that the seat did not get booked.

[QUOTE=”Tiffany, post: 18183, member: 7″]As a side note — there’s not much point in verifying Award Nexus results with the British Airways site if that’s also what you’re using to search. You’ll want to check against the JAL tool to make sure it’s not phantom space.[/QUOTE]

I would verify to make sure that the seat did not get snagged between the time Award Nexus detected it, and I made the call. And as I mentioned, I did verify through other sites. (I mentioned Qantas, but have also verified through JAL.

[U][B]I think Cathay is withholding seats from Alaska[/B][/U]. Maybe they get more revenue from other partners?