After two hours of searching on the ANA tool tonight, I assembled a decent itinerary for my December trip to China. It wasn’t perfect, but it was workable.
As I reported yesterday, no StarNet blocking on any Star Alliance flights was apparent during my call to reservations Sunday evening.
Unfortunately, things have changed today. Lufthansa transatlantic flights appear to be completely blocked. ANA showed F seats on the following flights, but each of the (three) UA agents I worked with saw nothing:
- LAX-MUC
- LAX-FRA
- ORD-FRA
- SEA-FRA
- DTW-FRA
- FRA-ORD
- FRA-DTW
- PVG-FRA
The good news is that other airlines do not appear to be blocked–yet. I will blog about my "initial" routing and flight selection later today, but I was able to snag space in TG and TK F, so at least I am somewhat mollified.
And to add a data point, I ticketed an OZ F award yesterday with flights found on ANA… call to the 1K desk took all of 3 minutes, as they were available and I had an incredibly efficient agent. Now on to book a SQ F award… hopefully that is still open!
Hey,,,i did a quick test just now…seems this is a united thing. air canada has every flight i checked.
@Darren: Good luck on the SQ award. LAX-NRT by chance? I’ve tried so hard to find space on JFK-FRA or FRA-SIN to no avail.
@kt: Thanks for your comment. It is certainly a UA problem. If you are not familiar with StarNet blocking, you can find some background on it here:
http://upgrd.com/matthew/circumventing-united-airlines-starnet-blocking.html
@Matthew: Yup, looking for SQ11 and SQ12 through NRT to SIN. Haven’t had time to go back to book that one… this week is getting away from me.