Different bucket availability on Matrix and on EF
 

Looking to book a flight:
AA website shows only V class available.
EF shows only V class.
Matrix shows S class as well.
On EF, I see S class only available on the BA codeshare for the equivalent AA flight.

What's going on? Which can I trust?

Where are you departing from?

EF by default shows USA point of sale availability. Matrix by default shows POS of the departure city - but you can adjust this to whichever POS you want. Different POS have different availability.

Also if you're looking at a connecting itinerary, married segment logic may be in play which means individual sectors may have different availability when looked at as a standalone flight than when looked at together as connecting flights.

JFK-LHR-JFK and I'm searching from a US IP address physically located in the USA anyway!

So should be no SITI/SOTO issue and no married segments either

Hmm. Sure you don't have a non-US POS cookie in Matrix? If you type in NYC in the Matrix POS, same result?

Fascinating! I now see the two different results are that S is available when OSL is the sales city but only V is available when NYC is the sales city.

How would one buy S priced in dollars? Using a European AA website and call the web services desk to reprice the itinerary?

And one other question: has anyone produced a search engine that finds, for a given specific itinerary, the cheapest sales city with the best bucket availability? That would be a great way product.

Update here: priced the itin using an LHR point of sale on americanairlines.co.uk -- it was only possible to buy the itinerary using a GBP credit card. AA web services told me that repricing would make it a dollar equivalent which was clearly refaring it to the V-class fare rather than converting the S-class fare to USD from a GBP price.

Are the phone agents (either web services or other agents) not able to just convert the price and let you buy it with a USD credit card? An old thread I found suggested they could do it by phone but has this changed?

I've found Matrix is not always 100% accurate with inventory. EF is more accurate.

BTW - if you use a VPN service, you can make AA.com think you are in any country you wish. This is an easy way to price in USD and pay with US credit card.

But how does that solve the problem of the fare only being available at a non-US point of sale? Do you mean I could have priced an S-fare on aa.com (US site) and paid using a USD credit card with a US billing address if I had accessed aa.com from a U.K. IP address?