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Old Sep 15, 2016, 12:29 pm
  #3  
sdsearch
FlyerTalk Evangelist
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: home = LAX
Posts: 25,927
You didn't get the wrong agent, you got the wrong fare.

The only BA fares that can be upgraded with AA miles are the ridiculously expensive ones.

It's not an upgrade option designed for leisure travelers. It's only designed to allow those business travelers who had to buy an expensive last-minute (or fully refundable) fare to upgrade with miles.

Flex fares are valuable for some business flyers, who don't know their schedule much in advance. They're rarely valuable for leisure flyers, unless perhaps the difference in cost is minimal, which it can be on some airlines such as LATAM on intra-Argentina flights, but not on AA or BA international flights certainly!

Upgrades on international flights are few and far between. They generally have to be on the same "metal" (physical planes) as the miles you're using. So with AA, you can only upgrade as far as you're flying with AA. But even then actual upgrades are not that often available in practice (especially if you have no status, and thus are last in line when there is competition for upgrades).

If you want to fly in a higher-up class, either buy it outright or use miles for it outright. (I'm flying LAX-DOH-JNB on Qatar [QR] in business class early next year, booked months ago with 150k AA miles round trip. With QR business class, only Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu departures (from either USA or South Africa) seemed to ever be available for award redemptions, so while i had first planned a weekend-to-weekend trip, I changed it to a midweek-to-midweek trip after I saw that award availability pattern.
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