Just a few days ago I wrote about the steps that were necessary in order to book Cathay Pacific business class awards.
- Non-stop flights to and from Hong Kong were not showing many awards available using partner airline miles (like American AAdvantage, British Airways, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan)
- They were available using Cathay Pacific’s own Asia Miles (which is a transfer partner of American Express and Citibank)
- But partner programs could see the space if you asked for connecting flights such as “New York to Bangkok on Cathay Pacific” the New York – Hong Kong and Hong Kong – Bangkok flights would both show available.
- There are some strategies for dealing with this ‘married segment’ logic if all you wanted was Hong Kong which I detailed.
There’s good news now, though. Non-stop business class awards on Cathay Pacific are available for partners to book again.
The Qantas website is showing business class award space available again (along with first class, premium economy, and coach which had already been showing up).
Award space shows up at the British Airways ba.com site as well, and is visible to other partners.
I called American and they appear to be seeing the same space. So book away!
@ Gary — Too bad there isn’t any FS+ when searching in advance for two!
Is this only for JFK to HKG or it is good to go for YVR and LAX to HKG?
I’ve been checking LHR and YVR. They’re not ‘back to normal’.
Fake news. CX is still not pulling up on partner airlines for many ex-HKG intra-Asian flights in fall. Even with married segments.
Still not fixed Gary…
11/6 – HKG-BKK nothing available on CX
11/6 – TPE-HKG-BKK oodles of seats on CX available
Not true – those flights have been there the whole time. It’s only flights after the 19th of June 2019 that you can no longer go in or out of Hong Kong (non transit).
I ended up booking Perth – Tokyo via Hong Kong. But Perth to Hong Kong was not available.
Gary, you need to stop using only JFK- HKG flights as a proxy for CX award availability. I suspect CX has figured out that US bloggers only look at this flight. For some reason this flight always has tons of availability but this is just not true for many other flights. When searching HKG-YVR (admittedly this has always been bad), the only flights that are ever available are HKG-JFK-YVR. This connection certainly makes no sense for non-NYC based people but this shows that somehow HKG-JFK has more availability.
Please check other flights (e.g., west coast or Europe to HKG) and you will see that availability is still poor.
Not a single day in Oct 2018 JFK-HKG has J or F seat. Sporadic dates have PE seats on one or two flight.
It is not a historical pattern based on years of booking CX award seats. The JFK-YVR-HKG flight almost always have availability because most dont like this flight. Yet even this flight does not have a single J or F for the whole October.
Yep, I was also checking October and nada in J.
definitely not true in F – 3/3/19 for example, has F availability on CX830&CX840 at Standard Levels for AsiaMiles members, but nothing for partners when checking QF, BA etc…
There are either still issues or additional rules in place that is causing blocking
Probably only works for the JFK-HKG route which bloggers put tremendous focus on ..Don’t see any inventory change, or even no availibility for most HKG-Europe routes.