I was planning to leave for China last night, but cancelled the trip due to a scheduling conflict with my day job and an aversion to sharing the Great Wall with 2,000 tourists or spending hours in line at the EXPO in the steamy summer heat. Cold as it may be, I am now leaning toward traveling to China in late December. Hopefully Hyatt’s Welcome Back promotion will return this fall, because I was planning to stay at Park Hyatt properties in Shanghai and Beijing next week.
About an hour before my scheduled Swiss Air flight from LAX-ZRH last night, I called UA to modify the reservation. I was busy yesterday and had neglected to look into availability so I figured I would just book whatever the phone agent came up with as a placeholder and modify it later.
I got connected to a s — l — o — w agent in Chicago who quickly said nothing was available. I told her simply to check on a connection through ZRH or IST and lo and behold, she found availability. I guess it was too hard to proactively look beyond her initial search results…
We finally established an itinerary. There is no way I am flying BKK-CAI-LHR on EgyptAir, but after 25 minutes on the phone while driving, I was not in the mood to keep searching until I could explore the ANA tool myself.
As she was calculating the taxes, my phone connection dropped. Usually when this happens, especially so late in the process of making a reservation, the agent will go ahead and complete the reservation. When I got home, I pulled up my record locator (the agent told me it was the same one) and received an error message on .bomb. A call to UA revealed that the reservation had been cancelled and no new reservation had been made.
Now I’ve got to check out the ANA tool and see if I can find a suitable routing before StarNet blocking returns. If past experience is any indicator of my success, I may have to wait till December to score the flights I really desire. I hate wasting time and last night’s phone call to reservation certainly counts as waste.
My last itinerary was pretty impressive. Once I get this new reservation resolved, I’ll post my previous itinerary and the new itinerary.
whats the deadline to get in before *net blocking returns?
are you using UA miles to route to Asia via Europe? 2 awards?
Lots of questions, but I’m trying to do something similar…so its of particular (and current) interest.
Thanks Matthew
@BTA: StarNet blocking is back…
On LH at least.
I’m using my UA miles to route to Asia via Europe. No additional miles as long as you come in under the MPM for your destination city. 145,000 miles for West Coast US – Europe – Asia and back. Stopover in Europe if you’d like.