Originally Posted by
rssfed23
My main questions for the team here are:
1) Is there any way aside from calling up again to purchase the redemption before next Wednesday (I'm not even holding out much hope I'll be able to do it then)? - I don't have an AAdvantage account and don't mind opening one up if I can easily transfer Avios there without losing their relative value.
2) Is this even a route I can get a reward ticket on? - My initial thinking was that the reason the system gave me an error was because it's SLC > JFK and that BA don't have a codeshare on that flight and thus it won't go through.
I know I can't get a revenue ticket issued by BA for that route (the error about no traffic rights comes up) but my logic was why would the HFP article tell me to use aa.com to find out reward availability for US domestics and call and book if it isn't possible for routes without a codeshare on?
Well, I think one has to be fairly diplomatic in terms of how you project Flyertalk knowledge, which can sometimes be wrong or misunderstood, and I can see it could be frustrating for an agent to have someone telling them how to do their job. It very occasionally happens to me in my job too, and it's not much fun. I guess projection is everything here, and without being on the call myself I can't really judge fully what happened here. And I have to say there is some risk here, if I may be a little candid.
- You can use BA to buy AA sectors for you on revenue tickets, that though is something you need to call up for if you cannot get a codeshare.
- Codeshares only matter on revenue tickets, they are not relevant on redemptions since they always book into prime codes. So that's a red herring.
- There are two potential issues here, firstly the recent bug by which BA.com doesn't show AA redemptions - that's the one that BA.com told us about via onscreen messages, and hopefully will be fixed soon (and possibly has fixed already); and a second one where connections are not well signposted - that's not going away soon, and so you best search by sectors
- There are married segment issues on AA in that some connections will be bookable when buying them separately won't work, which partly contradicts my previous point.
- You can't transfer Avios to AA, completely different scheme, you would need to credit something to AA or take up some AA credit card deal
- Most AA availability is indeed reserved for AA's own members
- However MilesAAver award are available to BAEC members
- Hence the advice to check specifically for MilesAAver availability on AA.com then check BA.com then ring up
- And on top of all of that, there can be short term outages and IT issues looking for availability which pop up from nowhere and then go away. As it happens my AA searches are not working as it was yesterday.
- I've no idea if there is something happening on Wednesday next week, that's a new one on me.
In your shoes I'd try tomorrow, starting with AA.com. As with many things in life, there is sometimes a case for not trying too hard.