It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written a post, but I thought I’d write this one down, mainly so that I remember it.

I’m currently planning a trip to the US – I was hoping to go in 2020, but then there was some virus thing that went around that you may or may not have heard about that put the kibosh on that plan. So, I’m doing it this year.

One of the upsides of the pandemic was that it did allow me to hoard frequent flyer points – most of the travel I have booked has been with points (both Qantas Points and Velocity Points), and lucking out with getting decent business class flights to and from the US.

One thing that is an issue with booking with Qantas points, though, is that the Qantas booking reference number is not always the reference number that their partner airlines use. This is especially true with bookings made for American Airlines and Alaska Airlines through Qantas. Without the booking reference number for the other airline, you can’t view your trip on their website and make seat selections prior to the airport, or avail yourself of meal pre-ordering if offered.

You can call Qantas and ask for the PNR, but Qantas hold times are frequently appalling. You used to be able to use the CheckMyTrip website, however this has since changed to app only and doesn’t show you the other PNR anymore anyway.

There are a couple of ways to do this, which I’ll explain here

Use the British Airways website

This one is quite easy – simply go to the British Airways website, and click Manage from the navigation bar:

Then, enter your Qantas booking reference number and your surname, and click Find my booking or tap Enter on your keyboard.

You’ll be prompted for your email address and contact number, if you haven’t provided them already – enter them and click Confirm and Continue. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see your flights, as booked, but in British Airways’ system. You’ll see all the legs in the itinerary listed. Click on one to display more info, then click Change Seat. You’ll then be taken to another page, where you should have an option to View or change seats for this flight. Click this option.

At this point, BA will helpfully tell you that the flight is not operated by them, and that they can transfer you to the other airlines’ website (in my case, it’s American Airlines). We don’t necessarily want to do that – instead, look under the Exit seat reservation section and you’ll see the information that we are after:

You can now take this booking reference and plug it into American Airlines’ website to make whatever changes you need there.

While this does work, I had a snag – you see, the flight I had booked had one leg on American, which then connected to an Alaska airlines flight, and neither booking reference worked! So I suspected there was a third boooing reference somewhere, as this was the only possible option that made sense. And it turns out there was!

Use the Malaysia Airlines website

This one is a bit tricky as it requires one of two things:

1. To be very quick with the Print Screen key on your keyboard
2. Or to dig around in your browser’s Developer Console.

First, go to Malaysia Airlines’ website, and select My Booking, and as we did with BA’s website, enter your Qantas booking reference number and your surname, then click My Booking.

Now, with your finger hovering over the Print Screen key on your keyboard, you will see, for maybe one second, your booking reference(s) appear on the screen. Mash that key quick! Then paste the resulting screenshot into Paint, Word or another application.

If you can’t do this for whatever reason, don’t worry! There’s another way.

Open your browser’s Developer Tools. How you do this will vary based on your browser:

• Chrome and Edge: Click the three dot menu at the top right of the browser window, select More Tools, then select Developer Tools. Or press Ctrl+Shift+C on your keyboard (Cmd+Option+C on a Mac)
• Firefox: Click the three line menu at the top right of the browser widnow, select More Tools, then select Web Developer Tools. Or press F12 on your keyboard.
• Opera: Open the Opera menu, select Developer, then select Developer Tools. Or press Ctrl+Shift+C on your keyboard (Cmd+Option+C on a Mac).

At this point you’ll get a popup with a lot of potentially scary code – don’t worry, there’s nothing to worry about! Make sure that Elements is selected along the top of the Developer pane if you are using Chrome, Edge or Opera; if you are using Firefox you want to be on the Inspector.

Click the first line of text in the code area, then press Ctrl+F to summon the Find popup at the bottom of the Developer Tools pane. In the search pane, enter  and the relevant area will be found in the hidden code.

Click the little triangles next to each line that has the airline-record-locator line in it, and your booking reference(s) will be displayed!

You can now use these booking reference(s) to check in, select seats and more with the operating carrier!

What’s with the different reference numbers?

Basically, different airlines use different systems which behave differently. Qantas, BA and Malaysia all appear to use Amadeus, while American and Alaska appear to use Sabre, so they don’t really talk with each other. Amadeus and Sabre are the big backend systems that most airlines use (there is also a third major, although smaller, player, Travelport) for bookings and reservations.

In any case, because the systems are different they use different reference codes – Sabre doesn’t use numbers in theirs, while Amadeus uses numbers and letters.

How do Virgin Australia do this?

Virgin make it much easier – they give you the booking reference for operating carrier’s website once you’ve booked, display it on the booking confirmation PDF they send you via email, and also on their Manage Trip page under a section called Partner Airline References. Easy!

Ha! You put your booking references on the internet!

While I’m sure 9ZAZAZ, BANANA and TURKEY are technically valid booking reference numbers, none of them are mine. Nor is my last name Doodleback.

It does go without saying though, you shouldn’t put your booking reference number in a photo online and if you really want to take a picture of your boarding pass to share with your Instagram friends or what have you, make sure you obfuscate all instances of the booking reference and deface the big barcode.

For most airlines, all someone needs to make changes to your booking is the booking reference number and your surname. For a good case in point, “Alex” details what happened when he saw that former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott did this, and how he was able to get Tony’s passport number with just these two piece of information! (Fortunately this is now fixed!)