Nick Bester

Hi Guys, new to the site. Trying to book a business class ticket using my AAdvantage miles from JFK to Santiago. When I look through the Avios search engine I see there are 7 seats available on my desired date. I then called AAdvantage and they said they don't have access to any business class seats on that flight on that date. Is this right? Shouldn't they have the same access? Any advice would be appreciated.

Nick

rbAA

Welcome. Nope, the airlines rarely share all or even part of the award space availability. It is a starting point, knowing what BA or CX show as award availability, and I've used that information to try to get the EXP agent to check further, but doesn't always work out.

JJeffrey

Welcome to FT. What exactly are you searching at BA? If you're trying to connect beyond SCL, you need to make sure to search segment by segment, i.e. JFK-SCL, SCL-XXX, etc. The BA site will show wonky results when searching connections. Otherwise, the availability you see at BA should closely match what AA can book, try HUCA.

sdsearch

Welcome to FlyerTalk.

In addition to everything else mentioned (and/or as an alternate way of saying some things that were mentioned above in other terms), any airline award site is subject to "phantom" availability, which you cannot realize is phantom unless you try to book it there, and then get the error saying that you cannot book it.

So it could be that what you see on the BA site is "phantom" availability and not actually bookable. Unfortunately, on the BA site that's hard to prove without actually attempting to book it.

That's why I prefer to use Award Nexus (www.awardnexus.com) for searching, instead of the BA site. Because there I can search both using BA's site and QF's site and compare the results if I wish, all with the same user interface. (Award Nexus is free up to a point for FlyerTalk members; click "more signup options" under the green Purchase button to sign up with your FlyerTalk login.)

But what airline did you find on BA? If AA, there's no better place to search for AA "metal" award flights than aa.com. If LATAM, on the other hand, you can't search for that on aa.com, but I get slightly more realistic results usually for LATAM via QF than BA (doing both searches on Award Nexus). But as mentioned above, you have to search segment by segment, not just connections, in case connections are producing "phantom" results.

unhappyflyer

today I went to British Airways to book an award flight from ORD to MCO on June 6. using AVIOS. Expertflyer has U2 T7. The award can be booked on AA in T.. But when looking on BA to use Avios it says it is NOT available. It was available last night on BA website. Called agent and he could not say why only that it is not available. He confirmed T class mut be available. Has anybody seen this before. Is there a requirement othen than T class for these ?

chicago747

The Frequent Miler blog just did an article about this yesterday : How to find AA award space on BA.com - Frequent Miler

BA's website seems to be having issues with showing correct availability. The results seem to also affect their call center. The only work around seems to be to keep re-running the search until the results show up. I booked an ORD-PVR nonstop on AA using Avios and took me about 20 refreshes to get it to show. Hopefully they get it fixed. I use 100% of my Avios for AA flights.

unhappyflyer

There are two threads on this that need to be merged (unfortunatley I dont have the link). Followed the suggestion to use the adjacent date search in the results and toggle back and forth until they came up. But then was told I cannot book an award for somebody else and need to contact local exec club. i assume this is new and there is a thread for that somewhere.

philemer

^ Great tip on the "refreshes". It took about 9 or 10 refreshes for me before any flts showed up. Booked BOI-PHX for 7500 Avios each. Better than 12.5K AA each.