mnhusker

Need help from the experienced people here.

I am looking at booking flights for a 60th birthday trip in December for my wife of 36 years.

I want to specifically route via London so that we can do some quick shopping and hit a favorite restaurant before going on to Tel Aviv.

Problem: when I go to the "Multi City" booking and put in MSP-LHR, LHR-TLV, TLV-LHR, LHR-MSP; it gives me the "sorry you can't do individual segments to do a multi city booking.

I can do this on the BA.com website but I lose free seat selection (Life time Platinum on AA, Blue on BA).

Any tips on how I can beat the AA web site?

Thanks John

JJeffrey

Yea, this is one of the very annoying features of the garbage "new and improved" multi-city booking on aa.com. Try Google Flights.

coolcoil

Did you try MSP-LHR-TLV-MSP? I'd assume that you would not get the individual segments message for that. Of course, I am assuming that you are only looking for time in London on the outbound trip.

Or, book as two separate round trips - MSP-LHR and LHR-TLV?

It's worth looking at in any case. I do a lot of multi-city trips, all international*, and find that more often then not it's much cheaper to have separate reservations. I almost always end up having one open-jaw ticket that takes me to my first destination and brings me home from my last, with a separate booking to cover the open jaw. Almost every time I try to book it as one PNR with multi-city the price is ridiculous.

*For me, international means flying to the US, visiting two or three cities and returning home. Those flying from the US to other countries might not be seeing the same thing as I.

krzysz

Search for the route on Matrix - ITA Software by Google . Select and copy the contents of the last page, with the final price and the itinerary, and paste all of it onto https://bookwithmatrix.com . Select "book with American" at the bottom of the page and you're all set.

USFlyerUS

Why not just put your AA number into the reservation on the BA website? Your AA Platinum status will carry over.

mnhusker

This an excellent idea.

I went to the BA.com website booking area and could not find where to enter this.

Could you be so kind as to further enlighten me?

Thanks

econometrics

TLV is the issue here, as AA will only want to serve you their (loathsome) codeshare flights on El Al.

I fly to TLV a lot, and I use Google Flights to build the itinerary every single time. This gets me the BA connections to TLV via LHR. I just click "Buy with AA" and it sells me the BA flight numbers on those tickets.

Before AA made their recent booking engine changes, I could "force" AA.com to show me BA marketed and operated flights to TLV. Now, you just can't. So use Google Flights.

mnhusker

With Google flights I am getting a premium economy fare that is twice what BA is offering through there website.

econometrics

When that happens, I book with BA and add my AA EXP number in the reservation during booking, as noted above in this thread.

IntVic

You should be able to select your seats on BA flights through "Manage My Booking" on their website.

worldiswide

Thanks for these suggestions. We fly to Tel Aviv a couple of times a year, and this is good advice. You cant do multi city when you have mult city itinerary.

Oh well, going for great again.

AAir_head

This worked perfectly; selected the "book with American" from the drop-down at the bottom of the page and it was booked and ticketed through aa.com swiftly. ^