How do I get Lifemiles to offer availability - not showing with direct searches, but is showing when searched separately?

Frequent Flyer Programs
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Hi All,

How can I get around the same issue I have all the time with lifemiles?  EXAMPLE BELOW

I tried to book a one way first class ticket using lifemiles.

The route was as follows:

26th April - Sydney to Paris.  This ticket should cost 115,000 miles.

When trying to book it as 1 ticket it came up unavailable.

When I tried a different search as 2 separate tickets there is availability as follows

26th April TG 476 Sydney (SYD) to Bangkok (BKK) FIRST CLASS
10.00AM           16.20PM

26th April TG 930 Bangkok (BKK) to Paris ( CDG ) FIRST CLASS
00.05AM           07.05AM

There is less than 8 hours in transit, same fare class yet always seems to have problems when trying to book from Australia to Europe. Upon calling avianca and spending hours on the phone on hold, only to have a member of their team say send an email.

Any help/advice would be fantastic

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This is where the screenshot technique comes in. The guide written on Lifemiles is here. Don’t bother to call LM, they are useless.

Don’t feel bad, you are not the only one that cursed LM. We had a fellow pointhack community member that had 200K LM and didn’t know what to do with it. I told him about the screenshot technic and he got his SYD-CDG ticket in F within 24 hours. He is a happy chappy now and speaks very highly of LM. Now the only thing he has to worry about is to not get too naughty with the massage in BKK :slight_smile:

Let’s look at it from another angle. Because of this little fiddly effort, it stopped many other people from taking the seat sway from you. If it was all easy redeemable online like AA, you will struggle to find seats. I challenge you to find a F seat from AUS to Europe on weekends using AA miles!

Skyteam has the best availability but that is because it is very hard to redeem with their program. Firstly, you can’t even redeem F with partners, and even with their own program, Korean Air requires you to fill out a form to apply for the award, and if you are redeeming for your wife and kids, you need to show certified copy of your marriage certificate and birth certificates of your child! For Garuda you even have to present yourself physically to a Garuda office to apply for the award! Compare to this, screenshot is nothing as it can be easily done at home within 5 minutes.

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