chrisw

Perhaps people are using search like good litter FTers?

billgrates3

Sometimes you should also tick the "All Airlines" box, as it will often give you a lot of different options, even with OW partners.... dunno why.

asimperson

Well, it's great people are using search but posting information to threads that have been dead for 2 years doesn't really bring anything new to the discussion.

pixpixpix

Ah .. the thread of the dead. Fly AA J all the way is long gone, flown away I guess.. but the questions linger.

After reading this ancient inquiry without noting the date I suddenly discover I'm in a time warp replying to a phantom.

So here goes.. has aa.com dramatically changed in the last two years? Arguable. But my current answer to the question is this:

What I do is find an itinerary on ita software or flights on expertflyer and then go to aa.com and enter the exact departure times and connecting cities of all flights I want.

With that kind of "special assistance", if you type v-e-ry- s-l-o-w-l-y and clearly, aa.com ususally can come up with the correct answer. Then I can go ahead and book.

Of course on occasion aa.com outdoes itself and gets the quickest and fastest and cheapest connections on its own. Price and schedule seems a definition improvement in this regard for simple flights.

CowboyupnTX

quote: "THEN pay to talk to a human. I really don't think it's fair that you have to pay to talk to an AAgent to accomplish something aa.com won't do"

Sorry for my ignorance but what charges are you talking about?

brp

You're EXP...you don't know about them

There are ticketing fees for talking to a person to do ticketing. These apply to non-EXP and even apply if the itinerary cannot be booked online. The latter is, of course, the stupid part.

Cheers.

CowboyupnTX

"There are ticketing fees for talking to a person to do ticketing. These apply to non-EXP and even apply if the itinerary cannot be booked online."


OMG that would be infuriating. Who comes up with these ideas? They need to be summarily dragged out back and shot.

nbevan

In general I find I can get better fares and itineraries on aa.com than elsewhere: making use of Search by Schedule with 50 flights shown for fine tuning.

This week I finalized an itinerary ex-LHR that was S class TATL and N class for the domestic flights. But when I tried to hold it the price flipped between the quoted price and a higher price rather than holding (though I could go to the payment screen).

I phoned AA to apply the 15% MC discount ex LHR. The agent said that other people had reported problems with holding flights this week. But he could not get S class TATL (though EF showed S7 in both directions). So I made and held an S class booking of just the TATL flights for him to work on, but he then could not get N class on all the domestic flights (some showed N0 on EF, but I could still book them on aa.com ).

Finally got a discount, but based on the higher fare class domestic flights.

So why the big discrepancy between the agent and aa.com? I had assumed that apart from W class they worked off the same inventory?

oklAAhoma

Yup. I, too, have found that Search By Schedule seems to consistently give me the best results. I'm learning to like the Search By Price and Schedule, but when I else fails I find myself reverting to good ol' Search By Schedule.

It makes no sense that the Search By Price feature deosn't work as well as the other two, but I haven't found it to be as useful. It frequently overlooks either a better schedule or a lower fare. It's weird, because it seems that it ought to work just like the "Plans Flexible?" link (that appears when using the Search By Schedule feature), but at least in my experience, it doesn't.

SuzanneSLO

I share the frustrations with the crazy flight information sometimes provided by search engine on aa.com. I am having to interrupt a Maui vacation next month to fly home for a meeting. My home town is quick regional jet ride away from LAX. When I searched the trip under price and schedule, ALL of the possible itineraries routed me through DFW.

The fares were attractive and would have made a good mileage run but I really was trying to minimize the loss of vacation time in Hawaii, so I tried to search by price.

Ah, now I could avoid DFW but the price was significantly higher. Hit the plans felixble, check for lower prices and I am told I already have the lowest price.

So now I search by schedule and low and behold there is a reasonable schedule, avoiding DFW, and saving me an additional 17% off the price.

At least it reminded me not to reject a trip as too expensive until I had used multiple search tools. -- Suzanne

cstead

As a serious UA flyer for the last few years, simply having a website that can book roundtrips with flights featuring alliance partners is awfully refreshing. In comparison, I'm being spoiled by the AA website

oklAAhoma

^ That seems to be the key.

ITA Hacker

I can't find the article on our website anymore, but this presentation contains a lot of the same content:

http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers...omplexity.html

ITA Hacker

Of course, as soon as I post that, I find the article:
http://www.itasoftware.com/pdf/SIAM2007.pdf