I just purchased (2) business rewards seats through the VA website for MEL-SFO on United. Both are Platinum VA members (long term, not that it matters).
Nothing about the booking process seemed out of the ordinary, my points were deducted/credit card charged and I wrote down my VA Ref #... received an email with my booking confirmation and logged into the UA website to select my seats. Still looked fine and all of our info was on both booking pages.
It wasn't until reading the confirmation PDF on the email from VA that I realised there was an issue, so I called the VA GCC and was told that "the seats weren't real, sorry, there must be a glitch... it's been happening lately, we will take a note, sorry about that." It's the 3rd time in the last year that it's happened, though at least this time it was instant and not by pure chance that I realised my flights were not actually ticketed.
Currently feeling really uneasy with the VA-UA partnership and feeling as though I need to frequently check the "confirmed" bookings are still in place. Not ideal when I booked about ~100 paid flights per year (about 20 of those with VA-UA alone) and have not had any codeshare issues with any other airline thus far.
I mean, I am grateful that the points can buy flights at all, but if I can't actually get the seats being literally sold to me, what is the point?
Has anyone else had this experience? Many thanks for any insight.
Nothing about the booking process seemed out of the ordinary, my points were deducted/credit card charged and I wrote down my VA Ref #... received an email with my booking confirmation and logged into the UA website to select my seats. Still looked fine and all of our info was on both booking pages.
It wasn't until reading the confirmation PDF on the email from VA that I realised there was an issue, so I called the VA GCC and was told that "the seats weren't real, sorry, there must be a glitch... it's been happening lately, we will take a note, sorry about that." It's the 3rd time in the last year that it's happened, though at least this time it was instant and not by pure chance that I realised my flights were not actually ticketed.
Currently feeling really uneasy with the VA-UA partnership and feeling as though I need to frequently check the "confirmed" bookings are still in place. Not ideal when I booked about ~100 paid flights per year (about 20 of those with VA-UA alone) and have not had any codeshare issues with any other airline thus far.
I mean, I am grateful that the points can buy flights at all, but if I can't actually get the seats being literally sold to me, what is the point?
Has anyone else had this experience? Many thanks for any insight.
