Originally Posted by
Smiley90
If I only have enough miles for a one-way ticket but the JL flight only shows up using the RT trick because it's end of schedule, I'm SOL, right? Just wait and hope it's still around in a two weeks?
Originally Posted by
NoLaGent
Yes and yes.
Most likely, yes and yes. You can try a backdoor way and test your luck.
The agents see what you see. If you don't see it they don't either, which is why if the one-way does not show and you don't have the miles for a round-trip you will be denied.
There are a couple of ways you might approach this that have varying chances of success. One way that worked for me the one time I tried it has a decent chance of success if you are dealing with a non-stop flight without connections and you get an experienced partner trained agent. It goes like this:
Say you are looking for SFO-HND 2/13/24 in J at end of schedule and it is only available round-trip because of the AS bugs (shows available on other partners).
1) Book SFO-HND in J on another date where it is available. Say it is available 2/6/24, book it on 2/6/24.
2) Call the partner desk. Tell them you want to switch the date of your flight from 2/6 to 2/13 and you tried to do it online but the system gave you an error (and it did) but you know that the flight has award availability and could they please switch the date. When I did it, because of the way I presented it with confidence the agent believed me that it was available and took a chance to try requesting the new date, the space came back confirmed within a few seconds but they had to manually ticket it for some reason. Still, all good. Obviously, don't even try this unless you know that space is available (I checked BA and AA before calling), but if you can convince the agent space is available but not bookable they have the capability to keep everything else the same (mainly flight #. Space must be available on the same flight # on the date you want to swtich to.) but request a different day and if the space is available and you can convince them to do this manual request it will work. I suspect the chance of this working would go down quite significantly if you were looking at a connecting flight with multiple segments. Also note, the flight you switch to must be available in the AS booking window somehow (if it shows up round-trip it is).