Hi to all in the FT community. New member looking for insight.

After 20 or so years going to the States from the UK, on different airlines I did not really collect rewards points.Either that or I have smaller amounts in delta /BA etc
However after a Biz class flight last year and some older points I have ( at last) some AA points that I wish to use up.

I want to travel with one passenger on points, two paid tickets , in biz, going out in july next year and coming back in August to DFW.

Shall i just call AA direct as doing this online looks impossible. Availability for award travel in biz , going direct seems to be non existent . Any thoughts from more experienced users of AA programme would be appreciated,
best to all

July is speak season for traveling, so it's not surprising that there's no availability direct. Consider booking with a stop or play the lottery waiting for availability to open up.

If you decide to play the lottery, consider getting an expertflyer.com membership, which will alert you once availability open up. However, the chances that award availability on direct flights open up in July might be small, so I would book direct.

Calling AA won't help you, since all the UK-DFW nonstops will show up on AA.com. The information in post #2 is good.

If you were to consider stops, then calling may help since some airlines (like IB, AB, ...) don't show up on AA.com.

AB award travel does show up on aa.com, though IB doesn't.

If you're willing to make a connection, which is probably a necessity when it comes to award travel in July, your best bet is to call AA and let the agent search all the possible connections.

Yes. Brain fart.

Happens to all of us from time to time.

Thanks for the heads up, at least now I know the probabilities are slim and i can consider the options.I suppose it is safe to assume that this will apply to ONEWORLD partners as well?

AA business awards are hard to come by. You will have better luck with AB/BA/IB J awards.

Keep in mind you will pay huge surcharges for BA J awards.

That's probably a reason why AA J awards are harder to come by than the others.

I recently figured that you can also come up with some fancy routings with AY. AY seems to have better availability than AA and doesn't have surcharges like BA etc.

If you dare, you can try looking for something like JFK-HEL-LHR

use ba.com to find award availability.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

If available, JFK-HEL-LHR on AY should show up on an award search at aa.com.

I subscribe to Expert Flyer and it does not monitor award availability. It does have a feature which will alert you if a specific seat on a specific flight opens up (e.g. seat 3A on flight 123 on January 5th).

You've been missing out on a nice feature of EF that has been there for some time now. It is there for any airline and class (paid, award, upgrade) that can be searched. For an award or upgrade on AA, for example, use the Award & Upgrade tool to do the search you want. When you get the results page look over to the rightmost column. There you will see a square box with a "!" in it. This is the Create Flight Alert icon. Click on it and you will get a pop up to create an alert for that flight. The Class Code for that particular class you searched of will auto-fill, just fill in a name for the alert.

BTW, EF now supports upward & upgrade classes for US flights. ^