Impossible to book multi-city award flights ("Error has occurred in our central database")

[bmcc]

I was curious as to whether this is a permanent or a temporary 'error' with Qantas' multi-city award booking tool.

I am a QFF WP looking to book an Emirates F award MEL>DXB>JFK. With a <24 hour connection time the award is 227,500. I am very familiar with the award rules.

Whenever I find a suitable flight combination, the online booking tool quotes me the taxes and points cost, allows me to enter my personal information, and then as I get to the payment page I receive the error: "Generic Error: An error has occurred in our central database. Please contact us for further information. (4002 [7597])".

I have called up QFF by phone, quoting them with the flight pair to book manually, and they tell me that they are unable to see the availability that I see from my end. They indicate that sometimes the website doesn't update partner airline availability". I have asked them to check 9 different dates that all show availability on the web site. They have no idea what the "generic error" means, although they can reproduce it on their end.

Any recommendations here? I plan complex routings using the multi-city award tool and am only interested in travelling in F so it is not possible for me to simply quote a city pair to the telephone agent - they would take literally all day to check availability. I understand the lag on partner availability on the QFF website, but this is obviously more than a one-off bug/lag if it is actually impossible to book the flights that show up as available??

 

[RichardMEL]

It does sound like the error maybe caused by phantom availability tbh

 

[muppet]

I was curious as to whether this is a permanent or a temporary 'error' with Qantas' multi-city award booking tool.

I am a QFF WP looking to book an Emirates F award MEL>DXB>JFK. With a <24 hour connection time the award is 227,500. I am very familiar with the award rules.

Whenever I find a suitable flight combination, the online booking tool quotes me the taxes and points cost, allows me to enter my personal information, and then as I get to the payment page I receive the error: "Generic Error: An error has occurred in our central database. Please contact us for further information. (4002 [7597])".

I have called up QFF by phone, quoting them with the flight pair to book manually, and they tell me that they are unable to see the availability that I see from my end. They indicate that sometimes the website doesn't update partner airline availability". I have asked them to check 9 different dates that all show availability on the web site. They have no idea what the "generic error" means, although they can reproduce it on their end.

Any recommendations here? I plan complex routings using the multi-city award tool and am only interested in travelling in F so it is not possible for me to simply quote a city pair to the telephone agent - they would take literally all day to check availability. I understand the lag on partner availability on the QFF website, but this is obviously more than a one-off bug/lag if it is actually impossible to book the flights that show up as available??

If you can only find the availability in the multi-city tool when entering the segments as separate sectors, then in my experience it’s likely a married segment rule. MEL-DXB and DXB-JFK are available as awards, but MEL-JFK is not.

 

[Mattg]

Not sure if this might help:

Qantas Website Error Codes (And How to Avoid Them)

If you've ever tried to make a complex booking using the multi-city booking tool on the Qantas website, you've probably encountered some of the many error messages that it often displays.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au