I hope this has worked out for you.
This happened to me yesterday as well, after I made a small change to my 280k itinerary which of course required the whole ticket to be reissued and threw the whole itinerary ‘on hold’.
Maybe my experience can be useful to others as a datapoint. Please skip if too long.
Despite basically begging in the call when I made the change, when I called back an hour later, and via text, they would not ticket it any faster than the standard 24 hours queue.
Later in the day my MEL-HKG-FRA flights dropped off, cancelled by Cathay Pacific after what would have been about eight hours of ‘on hold’ time.
After 90 minutes on the phone with the call centre (South Africa) they managed to ‘force book’ MEL-LHR on QF9 in a revenue fare bucket with a subsequent connection to Frankfurt on BA. Nothing like this was offered for the first 30 mins or so, with them basically telling me nothing could be done initially.
The itinerary changed again about 10 mins after I hung up, to QF9 on a date a week earlier than I had agreed, back in a U award fare bucket. I don’t really know why this happened.
Another long call ensued whereby a consultant (South Africa) ‘force booked’ availability on QF9 for the right day again as a business class award but insisted I would need to pay the much higher taxes/surcharges now that QF and BA segments were involved, and couldn’t budge on this point.
Luckily I’d researched a back up option for different dates and routings where CX flights were still available as awards, which I changed to instead during the call. I didn’t want to pay hundreds extra in fees for what I see as Qantas’ fault. I was also presented with the option of waiting three days from an answer from a ‘Oneworld desk’ as to whether they could reinstate my original flights but I wasn’t optimistic about follow through on this and so just switched to my alternative instead.
Surprisingly, the consultant still insisted that they couldn’t ticket the itinerary immediately!
I gave it an hour then called back, where finally the helpful consultant was willing to ticket it - it took them over 60 mins of dealing with me over the phone to get it all done still though. I got the strong impression from the number of steps the consultant did that the ticket was never going to issue if I had just left things be.
Even though I was considering adding some further flights and changes down the track, I will definitely not be tweaking this ticket again now and will just live with what I’ve got.
The biggest lessons I got are to do whatever you need to in order to get the itinerary ticketed ASAP, and that there is more that the operators can do to open up availability than they might reveal at first.. so keep pushing!
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