Over the last couple of weeks, there have been numerous reports of Alaska Mileage Plan’s online booking engine giving an error message when trying to book international partner award flights within 72 hours of departure.
Supposedly, Alaska has encountered significant amounts of fraud with last minute partner awards, where Mileage Plan accounts have been hacked and then used to book close-in travel that’s completed before anyone notices what’s happening.
In response, and while Alaska is busy reconfiguring its booking system to allow for multi-partner awards, it has decided to limit how close before departure most international awards can be booked. I was told that this was a temporary solution, but not given any sort of time-frame as to how long it’s expected to last.
What’s Happening
Currently, there are errors occurring when trying to book many Alaska partner awards online within ~72 hours of departure. The flights show as available, but when moving to checkout, you’re redirected to the screen shown above. A few things to note:
- This shouldn’t affect any awards on Alaska metal (and doesn’t seem to).
- It shouldn’t affect AA domestic awards (and doesn’t seem to).
- It doesn’t always affect the a flight route the same way: I was able to book an award two days out between Seattle and Frankfurt, Germany without issue. Trying to book the same award for a flight the next day gave me an error. I also got an error twice when trying to book Taipei – Seattle two days out, but was able to successfully book the award on the third try.
Quick Thoughts
This change won’t be noticed by the vast majority of people who use miles, since most last-minute tickets are domestic and those awards are unaffected.
It’s a huge bummer for many of us that are into points and miles, since desirable international awards (especially for business class) will sometimes only become available close-in. Not being able to book those awards with Alaska, even though they’re available through AA and other oneworld partners, is a significant ding for Mileage Plan.
The good news is that this is supposedly temporary. The bad news is that it’s even there to begin with.
Years ago, Alaska restricted certain Asian carriers because of issues with fraud, but I’ve never seen anything, from any program, that’s been applied this broadly. It seems like the airline is trying to do surgery with a machete. Hopefully, they’re able to rectify the situation and open up normal award availability sooner than later. In the meantime, yuck.
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