Questions and Answers

Are we approaching in a peak travel season for HKG? I’ve got an HKG-JFK flight coming up on 10/01 with my wife booked in F and myself in J waiting for another F seat to open up but looking at the trends for the next 7-10 has me a little worried. I’m seeing lots of flights with 0 or 1 F seats available on a lot of flights. Usually you don’t see so little F space this far out in my experience. I’m assuming these are revenue tickets and CX hasn’t started opening award availability earlier than the normal 36-72 before departure. My flight and another flight that day both still have 5 F seats available but if the award space is opening up a week in advance I may be screwed because I’m going to be in the Maldives with little to no internet access to monitor space opening up.

Also strange is I’m not seeing an F space available for the next few days even though there are flights with 2 and 3 seats open.

Anyone have any thoughts to help calm my nerves? 🙁

Unfortunately not. I was monitoring space from HKG to NYC for a long time and there were plenty of flights that never opened up space. Have you considered hiring an award booking agency like pointspros or others to help you if you are going to be disconnected in the Maldives?

Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear in my original post. The MLE flight is unrelated, I just mentioned that to say that if F space opens up the week before I’ll have a hard time monitoring for that and calling to get my seat upgraded. I have a J seat on the CX HKG-JFK flight. I’m not at risk of being stranded anywhere. I just want to get that J seat upgraded to F so I’ll be with my wife who already has an F seat on that same flight. I’m using Award Nexus to help me monitor for space to open up but I can’t check it every second and email alerts are only once per day.

So you’re saying the trend has changed from a year or so ago when they would open up all F space minus 1 seat?

Yes, it has definitely changed.

You were clear on the post. My suggestion was that if you are in a place that won’t have good internet, you could pay someone to do the monitoring for you so they can grab the seat when it becomes available.

Yeah, paying a service to help monitor the space and make changes for you can be well worth it. [URL=’http://pointspros.com/pricing/’]PointsPros charges $50, which I think is decent.[/URL]

[QUOTE=”Gaurav, post: 20889, member: 79″]Yes, it has definitely changed.

You were clear on the post. My suggestion was that if you are in a place that won’t have good internet, you could pay someone to do the monitoring for you so they can grab the seat when it becomes available.[/QUOTE]

Sorry, looks like the confusion was on my part. When you said disconnected I thought you meant I would miss a flight out of the Maldives. Makes sense after rereading it. Brain fart on my part!

That is a good idea about the award monitoring. If the space opens up will they process the upgrade on your behalf or will they just alert you to it? How long is the monitoring period for? These are probably questions I should contact them about but I figured I’d ask here first in case either of you knew.

Not quite sure how they handle it. Maybe [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] can discuss how PointsPros does it. Other shops may have different procedures.

Trends have definitely changed, at least this month. I’m not sure if it’s because September is such a busy period for business travel, but it’s been super annoying.

We’re happy to monitor space until departure, and if you give us your details we can make the changes (separate fee for that).

That being said, my experience with the Maldives is that internet is really quite good at most resorts, so you might be in better shape than you realize.

I’ll be at the PH Maldives, which I believe you’ve mentioned you’ve stayed at before [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER], so I’ll take your word for it that internet is good enough.

I’m hoping you’re right and there’s just a lot of business travel right now that’s eating up the space. I do see an F seat open this coming Saturday on the same flight I’ll be on on 10/01 so hopefully I’ll get lucky and at least one will open up for me two weeks later. That’s got me feeling a little better. Do you have any insight as to around what time of the day/night space for CX typically opens up? If it’s in the middle of the night I can set an alarm to wake up if need be.

Mmmm, I feel like it’s around 2AM Pacific, but that might just be when our tool checks space. You might want to subscribe to Seth’s wandr.me travel tools as well, just to have something checking at a different time than AwardNexus.

Internet is blazing fast there, you won’t have any issues by the main building, and Ben even reported good service in the water villa.

I totally forgot about the wandr.me OW search tool! Thanks [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] ! It’s great too because it runs 4 times daily and has SMS alerts so I’m more likely to see them. Just subscribed to it.

It doesn’t look like the Maldives is included in T-Mobile’s international free texting and data plan. I know you and Ben both have T-Mobile as well. Do you remember if calls and texts worked over Wifi there? Just wondering how I’d make the call to the AAdvantage support desk if something did open up while I’m there.

I have Google Fi, but at the time I had Sprint. I just used Google Voice/Hangouts, which worked great.

I forgot about Google Voice/Hangouts too. You’re full of great reminders today! Thanks again [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] !