Family Pooling Funny Business

Just before my departure from the States, I reconfigured the family pooling to direct excess status credits into credit-deficient accounts—your basic family pooling optimization. Normally, I’ll do this about a week before the ticket starts, but this year—as last year—I ended up modifying my family pools the night before travel. The program claims this is perfectly permissible—pooling changes are effective from 12:01AM AEST on the day following the change. I made the change at about 9PM PST, and at 5:01AM PST, it took effect (midnight AEST). Unfortunately, this is where the sensibility stops—while Family Pooling changes are timestamped in AEST, the flight activity log that the Family Pooling system uses to re-allocate credits is timestamped based on the local departure of the flight. The international dateline means that for the following 19 hours, between 5:01AM PST and 12:01AM PST the following day, flight activity originating in the Pacific timezone is allocated based on the previous family pooling arrangement, despite the new family pooling arrangement being active, pursuant to the terms and conditions. I know this situation is nothing new—indeed I dealt with the same problem last year, when I made similar arrangements. Then, Velocity assured me that they would address the deficiency in their systems, and manually re-allocated the credits in compliance with the terms. This year, the Velocity Call Centre seemed quite taken aback by my observations—clearly the system has not been changed, nor have staff members received training on what I am sure is a reasonably regular occurrence for an airline with flights across the international date line. Not only did they have to escalate the call twice, they then mischaracterized the manual re-allocation as a one-time courtesy, rather than a program entitlement. That said, they did agree to process the re-allocation on my first call, which was, in retrospect, certainly lucky.