Etihad business redemption

[Mars2atk]

Has anyone had issues booking business seats on Etihad with VA? I'm trying to book over the phone with my points and I've done the whole song and dance of looking online on the Etihad website and found dates with BusinessGuest seats available on 2nd Sept 2016, and they're telling me that those aren't available to be booked on their system even though there's still 2 seats showing as available.

So glad I double checked before hanging up, I was quoted about 88k for the cost of the flights, and thought it was a little low for business., turns out they were for economy.

 

[mmikeemike]

I've found that the EY Guest availability doesn't always translate into VA Velocity availability. It's possible that they don't release all award space for partner airlines. Best research tool in this event is the VA website, which can prove problematic for routes that aren't bookable via that.

 

[djchuckles]

I found that you need to search EY site for each leg individually. Eg. EY showed First Award for LHR - SYD, but actually no availability for just AUH - SYD so because of that Virgin can't access the whole route