I just booked China Airlines business class from Taipei to Bangkok yesterday via Air France with the 25% Amex transfer bonus to Air France and I’m super excited! However when trying to pick my seat I ran into some issues and wanted to outline how to resolve them here in this quick post.
China Airlines Doesn’t Recognize Partner Airline Confirmation Codes
After making the booking on the Air France website, I received an email shortly after with my China Airlines ticket number and booking reference. In order to pick my seat, I would have to go to the website of the airline I’m flying (China Airlines) and use either one of these codes to pull up my reservation and then pick my seat. Pretty standard stuff.
However, for whatever reason, when going to China Airline’s seat selection page and inputting the confirmation code given to me by Air France, I’m met with a popup not letting me proceed in the seat selection process. I even tried both the booking reference and actual ticket number and both didn’t work. Super weird but I assume that their system can only handle their own award tickets or confirmation numbers.
Czech Airlines Allows You To Choose Your China Airlines Seat
Yep you read that header right. The most random workaround (found by KoolKatFat on Flyertalk) is to input your Air France booking reference into the My Bookings page of the Czech Airlines website.
After entering your surname and 6 letter Air France booking reference, you’ll be taken to the manage booking page. If you click on Manage Booking then Additional Services, you’ll be taken to another page where there’s an option to choose your seat.
The choose your seat page is pretty straightforward, showing a seat map of the business class cabin and what seats are available for selection. From here, you can make your seat selection and confirm it at no additional cost!
Conclusion
This was a super unexpected workaround but I’m not super surprised since Czech Airlines is a member of the Skyteam Alliance along with Air France and China Airlines. Even if this workaround didn’t work it would have been fine since you can always just call China Airlines and they should be able to get your seat selected. But this just goes to show that it doesn’t hurt to try other alliance airline’s websites to see if it works!
