I just had a very strange experience trying to book an AA award ticket on Royal Air Maroc. The routing was showing availability online, but seemed like it might be phantom (wouldn't let me complete the booking process). So I rang AA's call centre in Germany, pressed the number for AAdvantage, and got put on hold for 10 minutes, before the line suddenly rang once and transferred me straight to Iberia's Portuguese call centre (in Portuguese). Not sure how that happens, but anyway, I hung up and called back, connected to general reservations, and asked for someone who could book me an AAdvantage ticket over the phone.

The general reservations agent put me on hold for a while and then suddenly someone picked up and didn't say anything for a while. When I asked if anyone was there, I got a "yeah, who's this?" Once I explained the issue and that I'd like to book a ticket by phone, he proceeded to try to make me troubleshoot the website, saying that the availability showed for him until he gets to the login page. Of course, the issue was only after login, so I informed the agent of this and asked him to look up the availability in his reservations system. tHe said "well no, I can't login, since American Airlines employees aren't allowed to login." I then asked him if he was actually the reservations department, and he said "yes, reservations and web team." I asked if he could then book the flight on my behalf with my miles, and he said "no, since I can't login to your account - you need to do that online."

After that, I asked him if he was seriously telling me that it is not possible to book an AAdvantage ticket anywhere but the website, at which point he said "oh, well I'd need to login to my system then." After he got in there, we had a long go around of him explaining that it needed to be a multi-city ticket, since I wanted a layover at CMN. I told him, no, it was a one way with a connection, and we went back and forth for a while, before he finally agreed to put it through as a one way. After that, he tried again and couldn't book it, so told me that the problem was the stop at CMN: "if you're flying to Africa, you always need to stop in Europe first. No way around it." So I asked him to look at just MIA-CMN direct instead, and he said "no, same issue - there's no way to do that either, you'd have to stop in Europe first to get to CMN now." At this point, I decided it was hopeless, so I asked to be disconnected so that I could call back later. I would have liked to answer the survey, but after staying silent for a few minutes, he simply transferred me to another agent (probably to avoid that). The new agent started off equally as confused, before eventually just saying that she couldn't see the availability because I was holding it online. Despite having received the error message and 3 seats still showing up in the search.

I assume it is then phantom availability after all, but I'll try again tomorrow to confirm. But what a weird series of phone interactions...