rinipiyan

I was priced a very decent fare from SAN-YVR, and when I'm about to book it through the google flight link, it simply takes me to AA homepage, I have to re-enter my search criteria and the price triples! I've tried multiple dates, same result. What happened to the good ole link where you can just go directly to payment on AA.com?


Here is an example:
https://goo.gl/flights/RHLP

flightrisk

I don't have an explanation, but I've noticed similar behavior when I'm trying to force "abnormally" long layover.

Your flight has the same issue - it is a >9 hr connection. If you choose the 49 min connection; or the 3 hr 39 min connection, then it does properly link to AA.com. However, the 6'29" and 9'21" both say "Check price". Furthermore, those flights do not defaultly show up on an AA search.

BTW, I had to break it up into a multi-city itinerary with choose by schedule and selected the individual legs to purchase flights like this. It will show the correct price.

AlwaysAisle

Yes, as flightrisk said, do it as multi city search on Google flights. No problem, price out as $100.20 and can purchase via AA.com.

aztimm

And here is the link for that:
https://goo.gl/flights/DJO6

BThumme

AA.com doesn't let you book that. If you hit continue, it spits back saying choose a different flight or fare. New minimum is $180.

I bat about 20% on AA allowing me multi-city booking referrals from GF.

rinipiyan

Yup I am getting about the same, in July it jumps to $400 rish, Aug jumps to $200 ish, Oct still surges up.

Taoyuan

I have a lot of difficulty booking those types of itinerary -- can generate them via multi-city on aa.com, but the website often errors out and says fare no longer available.

aacar

Try using Hipmunk. It got me to the AA payment page when I encountered the same problem last week.

rinipiyan

Unfortunately hipmunk errors out. I also tried priceline and expedia, both with the same error.

I was even able to find the fare through AA multi city search, errors out after I choose to price it.

Very strange, it's not the first time AA does something like this on the LAX-YVR route.

weirdlyndon

This is a well known and documented issue. What's worse is that OTAs and AA have a fare construction for them but often times there are no seats in the respective fare classes to book through.

A year ago I knew that if I found a good price via searching multi-city I could find a site (vayama.com, cheapair.com, justfly.com) that could actually force it through and ticket. Now I'm having a very, very hard to find a site that can actually ticket a res at the price shown.

AA's site is abysmal with this stuff. At least if you do a multi-city search with GF and see a fare for Delta or United, those re-direct properly and you can actually complete the purchase on those airlines' sites. AA is a whole separate beast...

BThumme

Yeah to build off this, even if you multi-city search it on AA, AA will spit back the lower prices (often like 5-10 similar routings/times), and they all will error out. It's completely broken.

nov11

It's more of a married segment availability issue. Google flights shows those 4+ hour connection with a lower price than on AA.com.

e.g. SAN-LAX-YVR
If you break it into two segments:
SAN-LAX ...N9
LAX-YVR ...N9 (after 4+ hour connection)

But if you do it as one segment:
SAN-LAX-YVR ...V9 N0 etc.

Since Google flights mostly use married segment availability for up to 4 hours connection (which is the norm for most US/Canada flights), AA allows connection up to 18 hours to/from Canada. Hence it will error out if you have a 4'01" connection because Google assume both segments are available in N but it's not when you click onto Google (you can't go around this and use OTA as well).

IME, if you force an overnight connection AND if your connection is between 12-18 hours, it will give you the 2 segment availability that you want otherwise it'll revert back to the married segment.

Hope this helps!

PS: Same goes for QR flights as well but you can't do anything except rely on married segment for anything less than 24 hours. You could have a 23'59" connection at DOH but it'll still be married segment.

SkyTeam777

Is four hours the max connection aa.com will permit for married segments?

rj123456

I have this issue on non stop flights (so no married segments, no layovers etc). GF shows identical prices for BA and AA (LHR-SJC; SJC-LHR premium economy) whether tried as RT or multicity. However when I try to book this on aa.com it fails over to the home page and then pulls up a higher fare. I can book this on BA but I wanted to burn some AA gift certificates GRRR

dieswaytoofast

Sometimes, calling into AA, and reading out the specific ite works.
Sometimes.
I haven't been able to get a clear reading in a pattern tho...