Originally Posted by
ArizonaGuy
Completely ignore the codeshare aspect of flights when booking awards. It doesn't apply, you can't book codeshares on award tickets. CLT-MUC is operated daily as LH429. It's also US5608 and TK8590, possibly some others too. Doesn't matter - you can't book US5608 as an award. You'll be booking the actual flight # of LH429. And you can book LH429 whether US puts its codeshare number on it or not.
So this fact combined with the fact ANA is showing what's available at the "low" level - as there is only one level for *A and partner awards - means you don't need to be concerned about somehow being forced to redeem at a higher level for *A partners.
Thank you for your help. I booked our award tickets. The ANA tool is extremely useful. I had two different options researched for our outbound trip, and that came in handy because in the 15 or 20 minutes between researching and calling, there was one less seat on our slightly preferred option. I needed 4 tickets and they only had 3. I quickly got online with ANA and confirmed this and switched gears to our 2nd option. So, we are flying to BCN through Munich on LH then JK with a 5 hour layover inbound (if we could have flown through Frankfurt we would have had a much shorter layover) and LH through Frankfurt on the return. 240K miles for 4 tickets + $136.66 in taxes and fees per person.