The BAEC phantom award availability is unfortunately a fact of life, reported by many here.

Any way to accurately check availability then?

The JAL site is usually accurate.

I checked the JAL site and they also show availability. American tells me that JAL just lists their availability and not the availability of awards that AA has. Same for BA. This seems weird as every advice I've read states to use the BA (or JAL) website for availability and then call.

CX/JL Award Availablity using AAdvantage (No) vs BA.com (Yes)
 

I would have thought AA and BA would be using the same inventory for award tickets on CX and JL, but BA.com shows availability and the AAdvantage AAgent says no availability on the same flights.

This occurred on numerous flights where BA.com would show 4 award seats and AA reservations says no award seats.

What gives?

Are you doing a segment by segment search, or doing something like a BOS-SIN search where there are multiple segments? BA's booking engine is notoriously unreliable for inventory unless you go segment by segment (it will show a lot of phantom availability based on short intra-Asia segments married with longhaul segments). So search (CX or JL gateway)AAA-HKG/NRT/HND, then HKG/NRT/HND-BBB(destination), not AAA-BBB. I find BA to be extremely accurate when I follow this rule and search for CX inventory in this manner- I have booked multiple awards on AS this way by feeding CX flight segments I've searched segment-by-segment on the BA website.

PS: first page of the forum, a very active thread here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ilability.html

;)

Yes, I was searching BOS-PEK, and it was showing segments o=transpacific on JL and CX, where AA was saying there was no space. But when I now go back and just search BOS-HKG, or ORD-HKG, there are no seats on BA.com either.

That's for early Nov. When I look for the next two weeks, seems to be reasonably good availability in Biz and First, so they obv. are holding onto a lot of inventory at this time.

JL inventory seems even thinner. Not sure if they follow the same practices re: releasing premium class award seats?

Has anyone encountered a reverse of this situation? I've only been using BA's site to check for J availability and accepted that, when I wanted to go, there was no Qantas availability from the region I wanted to depart from to Australia. But for some reason, I decided to check on the AA site (as it can actually "see" QF flights unlike CX etc) and there were one or two awards showing on dates that worked for me. These weren't on the BA site (well they were but only in Y). I have one on hold so they definitely exist.

My question is... given that zero availability is showing for CX in J on the BA site, is it worth calling AA to ask them to check a handful of dates and routes on the offchance the same thing happens again? Obviously I'd rather do this online but you can't for CX.

Cheers

Yes. It has been reported since 2014 that AAgents sometimes can see seats that neither BA or JL site would show. If the dates are important to you, definitely call AA just to make sure you do not miss out on anything.

Thanks :) Will give it a go...

Experiencing lots of phantom availability for QF flights LHR-DXB-SYD. Calendar showing J and F avails but when I click on the flights each time I get the "Sorry the flight is no longer available" error message. Anyone else experiencing this?

That route is a nightmare for availability searching - almost every day shows J and F availabilty but none of it is real. Its been like that for at least a month.
Doesn't seem to affect Oz-USA searches as much.

Iberia phantom space?
 

BA and EF both show these flights as available but AA agent can't see em. Same result with business. Is phantom space an issue when it comes to BA/IB?

http://i65.tinypic.com/104i2rr.jpg

Is this just when trying to book an award or do you have this issue with a revenue ticket too?

This doesn't answer your question, but I wouldn't bother with awards with BA on this route. Taxes could possibly be more than buying the tickets outright.

I have not had this problem with Iberia awards - although I have had to call again and try with a different agent. I've also sometimes had to persuade agents that BA 5xx flights are operated by Iberia and can be booked with IB flight numbers. On the date you showed above, EF shows U9 on all of the Iberia LHR-MAD flights.

Bill