Cyrano
27th Jun 2005, 18:08
Hopefully some knowledgeable soul out there in PPRUNEland can advise me.
Mrs C and I are off to Japan in a couple of months, flying with Air France (back of the bus, I'm afraid). We've booked through Expedia and had no difficulty doing the seat assignment for the outbound long-haul leg (AF B777). However the return flight is an AF flight number on a Japan Air Lines B747 and this is where the fun starts. Expedia (and AF customer service) say that they have no access to the seat plan for this flight and that seat assignment will only be possible at check-in. JAL customer service say they would be quite happy to assign our seats but (a) they have no record of our names as booked on the flight [perhaps because we are booked under an AF flight number rather than a JL one? or perhaps because it takes some length of time for the AF passenger names to percolate through to the JL manifest? just my speculation] and (b) they don't recognise the AF locator reference as a valid one for their system. :{
So my question is: has anyone encountered anything similar and found a solution? Strange as it may seem, I have little desire to be among the last people to get a seat assignment for a 12.5 hour flight in Y class. :uhoh: Is there any way I can get round this lack-of-communication-between-systems? Being unable to support advance seat assignment seems to me to be something of a black mark for a codeshare operation...
Mrs C and I are off to Japan in a couple of months, flying with Air France (back of the bus, I'm afraid). We've booked through Expedia and had no difficulty doing the seat assignment for the outbound long-haul leg (AF B777). However the return flight is an AF flight number on a Japan Air Lines B747 and this is where the fun starts. Expedia (and AF customer service) say that they have no access to the seat plan for this flight and that seat assignment will only be possible at check-in. JAL customer service say they would be quite happy to assign our seats but (a) they have no record of our names as booked on the flight [perhaps because we are booked under an AF flight number rather than a JL one? or perhaps because it takes some length of time for the AF passenger names to percolate through to the JL manifest? just my speculation] and (b) they don't recognise the AF locator reference as a valid one for their system. :{
So my question is: has anyone encountered anything similar and found a solution? Strange as it may seem, I have little desire to be among the last people to get a seat assignment for a 12.5 hour flight in Y class. :uhoh: Is there any way I can get round this lack-of-communication-between-systems? Being unable to support advance seat assignment seems to me to be something of a black mark for a codeshare operation...