[Anonymous]

[boeing747-400]

Continental’s approach to award fares makes waves in the Star Alliance
The Washington Times this week drew attention to one of the most significant impacts of Continental Airlines moving from SkyTeam to the Star Alliance: transparency.

All of the Star Alliance airlines have an integrated system called StarNet for booking seats on one another’s flights using frequent-flyer miles. Most of the member airlines use proprietary restrictions build into their own award-fare systems to “block” most of the available seats from showing up.

In making its move to the Star Alliance, Continental decided it would join just two other carriers–Air Canada and Japan’s ANA–in making the full volume of seats available for booking.

This move gives members of Continental’s OnePass program a big advantage over United Mileage Plus or U.S. Airways Dividend Miles program members, who will see only the limited number of seats that their carriers want them to see.

Among other advantages that OnePass offers over its domestic-partner counterparts:

* Award tickets may include both a stopover and an open jaw (arrive and depart from different airports);
* Tickets may be routed from North America to Australia via Asia; and
* Elite members of OnePass are exempt from cash copayments when upgrading using miles.

If you’re looking to join a Star Alliance frequent flyer program, these benefits make it more attractive to go with OnePass.

[Baggageinhall]

What utter nonsense. A lazy journalist has conflated two different facts and melted them into a single misleading story.

1. The only airline within Star Alliance to active block their own members from redeeming seats that other carriers have made available is United.

2. Only two airlines allow you to see award availability from most Star Alliance partners online; Air Canada and ANA.

That does not mean with Lufthansa for example, just because you can’t see a Thai flight on their online award booking, that you can’t book it, just that you will need to ring a LH call centre.

The story here is that CO have simply implemented the same system as ANA and AC and allowed their One Pass members to book most award flights online. That is a significant achievement and one that CO ought properly to be congratulated for. It certainly makes them the most attractive US proposition within *A.

It also highlights United’s seat blocking, but misleads readers into thinking that everyone does it when in actual fact, UA stand alone.

[SteveYee]

How does one really know that United blocks its members from seeing the availability of award seats from other Star Alliance carriers?

Are you saying that all the other airlines allow their members to view award seats of other Star Alliance airlines on their respective websites, when the members signed in with their frequent-flyer numbers?

[Baggageinhall]

ANA, AC and CO allow their members to see almost all *A award flights online and place no restriction on their members booking available flights.

The remainder (except United) do not allow their members to see *A award availability online, you have to ring their service centre BUT, importantly, they do not block availability so if you are a BD member and TG have a seat (for example) it’s yours to book

United do not let their members see *A award availability online, you have to ring their service centre. Here’s the big difference. United admit that they selectively block availability on their *A partners. So taking the same TG seat in the example above, UA might decide that they don’t want to pay TG for a seat this quarter so although the seat is available for any *A member to use, UA will not allow their own Mileage Plus members to book it.

[boeing747-400]

“Today’s Washington Time “On the Fly” column offers kudos to Continental for their transition to Star Alliance — offering liberal award routing rules such as flying from the US to Australia via Asia and permitting both an open jaw and a stopover on an award (though not permitting US to Asia via the Atlantic, though there have been some rumblings that this may be permited, perhaps for additional miles, in the future).

The major contrast drawn in the piece is to United. With Continental’s decision to make most Star partners available for award search online, it becomes much clearer when United is blocking award inventory — if United says a given flight is unavailable, isn’t being offered by the partner airline for an award, or doesn’t even exist, it may well be showing as bookable on the Continental site. (Of course except for Air China and Swiss, Star Alliance award availability shows up on the ANA award search website — but having another site showing the seats puts the lie to the argument that the partner is only offering the award seats to ANA and not to the rest of the Star Alliaince.)

Continental has done a nice job out of the gate with making Star partner award seats available online.”————-View from the Wing, 11/2/09

[Senator]

Dear all,

Without a doubt, CO’s entry into Star Alliance is good, and as I posted a couple of weeks ago the ability to check award seat availability on other carriers is great. Specially now that some charge more for phone bookings.

However, it does not look like CO One Pass is showing all inventory. No LX, LH, OS on flights that M&M show open.

While CO One Pass is a great addition for research, I have only seen SK, CO, UA (Econ only), AC, LO, MS flights. Simple search like BKK-SIN yield no result despite SQ and TH are both frequent on the route.

What all programmes miss is the leg-by-leg search. I have been able to many times, work with M&M staff to get “impossible” routings done at “impossible” times by breaking the trip up to segments. Booking a C-class trip to BKK for Dec 27 on Dec 13 was not simple, but possible with the help of call centre.

[Author]

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