Online award booking error?
 

Has anyone encountered a recent issue/error when trying to use the old online award booking engine? It doesn't let me get to the results page when entering a variety of city pairs that AA doesn't serve (e.g. LHR-SYD). Instead, it gives me an error that "this trip can't be booked online" and prompts me to contact reservations. The old booking engine seems to work for city pairs that AA does serve (e.g. SMF-SYD), and the new (but terrible) booking engine works for my LHR-SYD example above.

Could this be AA gradually, forcefully phasing out the old booking engine? Or just another IT glitch?

I was getting this same error this week, I'm guessing (hoping) it's just another aa.com IT glitch.

In my example, I was looking for a simple RDU-YYZ award using the old search. Having "All Airlines" selected returns the "this trip can't be booked online" error, while having "American Airlines" selected worked fine.

The new search is truly terrible.

The legacy engine seems to be so cleaner, faster, and easier to review but this week it choked quite a bit for me on any award that included AA + international partner metal with infamous error on the confirmation screen (empty PNR gets generated with deleted segments). Call to hold or ticket it.

I am having some serious issues with the AA award system too. I have been searching for award availability for a few months now, and just this week, it has gotten super slow and most of the award availability disappeared. There isn't even the tab for "Economy special" awards (or whatever they are called).

I experienced a problem of another stripe. I booked two award trips USA-CMN and BCN-USA, put them on five day hold. Overnight, both awards disappeared and my miles returned to the miles I had prior to booking the awards. No email, nothing indicating any problem, just *poof*. :mad: (Fortunately, the awards were still available, and rebooking worked.)

Sounds like a lot of stuff happening at once. Wonder if AA is getting ready to make changes and these glitches are a result. :-(

I have two Awards on hold right now. Everything seems OK so far but I will be watching them closely. I did notice that the miles were not subtracted from my account when I placed the Holds. The Holds are still showing up under "My Trips" however, with some odd verbiage I hadn't seen before. The same thing happened with a trip I put on Hold last week. But everything went through OK when I went to purchase and the miles were deducted at that time.