How to: Use AA Miles to Book Award on Etihad / EY (Archive - 2015 and earlier)
Jan 9, 16, 12:14 pm - Wikipost
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Booking Award Seats on EY / Etihad Airways Using AA / AAdvantage Miles
This thread is about "how to" book Etihad / EY award seats using AA AAdvantage miles. This wiki is new, so anyone with 90/90 who wishes to add helpful information is, of course, urged to do so.
You cannot search or book awards for travel on EY (Etihad) on www.aa.com
You can search award availability on EY's website. Look for seats on flights operated by Etihad Airways labeled as "GuestSeats".
You have to call AA to book them. You may need to request the AA agent to look up the inventory one segment at a time in order to find the inventory in their system. OR:
Your best bet is to call AA Australia (+61 2-9101-1948 ) - although the call center is actually in Suva, Fiji -as they can see the inventory reliably, and you can book (or put the EY segments on hold so you can flesh out the award afterward).
If you find EY inventory from your continent but not your city of choice, as usual you can include any other AAdvantage award airlines in order to complete the itinerary. E.g. LHR-xAUH-DEL-xAUH-CDG on EY connecting to CDG-LHR on BA.
It's beyond my own capabilities, but surely someone here should be able to write code that automates (or partially automates) repeatedly checking for award tickets and available seats on EY's web site.
Various subscription sites already get data from QF and BA web pages, it's just that EY is not in an alliance and so no commercial site has bothered to do it AFAIK.
The only thing I have tried to use is Lazarus (form filling addon for Firefox) but it messes up the EY page.
KVS Tool (Diamond) can pull EY availability. It won't do it automatically for you on an ongoing basis, but you can select a date range (I think it's 30 or 60 days but don't recall since I'm not at that computer right now) and have it filter by whatever criteria you want (# of seats, fare class, etc.)
It wasn't too expensive; I think I paid $20 for a 3-month subscription while I was trying to plan 2 trips. Saved me a ton of time; I popped on twice/day and clicked a button to initiate a search and came back a few minutes later to look at the results. Did that until I found my 2 Apartment seats in March, then called AA to book. As usual, US AA couldn't see the availability, but the Australia call center booked it with no trouble.