Separate Domestic and International booking with VA - 1 ticket?

[Demonoid]

Friends, this may seem like a trivial question but here it is:

I am planning to fly to LAX around June or July next year in J. Specifically, a Business Reward seat with VA

I am based in Canberra, so if I book it via Sydney, its 107,800 plus the taxes. Because my points situation is tight, I could book the flight from Sydney direct and its about 94k plus taxes.

My question is, if I book and pay for the CBR - SYD flight separately, and then book the SYD - LAX flight on points, can I add the 2 bookings together down the track? Reason being is that I obviously would love to check my bags once in CBR and pick them up in LAX.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[markis10]

AFAIK you cannot merge the two bookings together, but as far as checkin goes I would expect its possible to through check having two different bookings.

 

[williamsf1]

AFAIK you cannot merge the two bookings together, but as far as checkin goes I would expect its possible to through check having two different bookings.

Unless things have recently changed, it is not possible to thru check 2 seperate bookings due to Sabre limitations.

 

[markis10]

Unless things have recently changed, it is not possible to thru check 2 seperate bookings due to Sabre limitations.

Interesting, I would have thought that was almost a basic requirement of a non LCC system, good to know.

 

[Fifa]

I can confirm you are unable to check your bags from CBR-LAX.
In May we flew SYD-PER-DPS on separate tickets and we had to collect our bags in PER. It was a pain as VA changed our first flight which left us with 5 hours to kill in PER :shock:.
We had to store our bags at the domestic terminal so we could fill in the time in the PER Lounge.
I cannot understand why it is so hard!

 

[totd]

Same problem here. I wanted to book flights (all revenue, not points) from ABX-SYD-AKL, but due to schedule limitations I was not able to book under a single PNR. Person from the GCC said that it should not be a problem, check-in angel said not a chance. We had to make our own way from SYD T2 domestic to T1 Int'l. At least we the transfer desk people on the return leg were nice enough to let us check straight in and organise our transfers to the domestic terminal at no cost.

I also did ABX-SYD-OOL last month. That was using a two41 and a J points upgrade. In that case I was told that the checkin system cannot find the two bookings when one is a points/reward flight and the other is revenue.

All in all, seems like a pretty lame system that can't handle even the tiniest bit of complexity. By the way, what is the point of an interline agreement, if VA can't even interline between their own flights? (btw: ABX-SYD is an XR/Virgin Regional Airlines flight)