Something strange has been happening the past couple weeks as I've been trying to book at TATL award flight in business on AA via AA website. I see the award space available for a "lower" number of miles, put in passenger info & contact info, then get to a website error. Immediately when I search again, the lower price is gone.

This happened 3 times on separate days, on different flights.

Is this really just someone else clicking faster than me for the same award flight? Or is something else going on?

Is this for all AA metal flights? Sounds like some sort of a glitch or IT/cache issue, or maybe just phantom availability although it's strange to see that with all-AA award space.

IME this is usually indicative of phantom award availability. Did you cross check on BA or EF?

There was some weird glitch the other day when I was looking at booking two different trips. It was very odd, to say the least.
It showed say on Wednesday the flight from DFW to BHM was say $500 but on Thursday it was $12,000. I would go out and start over and same thing. I cleared my computer and all then went back and all was back to normal. It’s weird because while looking at that flight I also tried another we are going on and it did the same thing but some crazy amount of $ or miles, I was also searching to use miles.

This has happened a few times to me. It's very odd to describe.

Searching awards using calender view, you'll see maybe 15 'good' awards. Click on one, try to hold or book, get the error. Go back and search again. Maybe half the awards are gone. Grab the next best date. Error happens again. Go back and search again. Now maybe three of the 15 awards are there. Do it again, same results, then the awards are gone.

The entire process of 15 awards to no awards, with multiple attempted bookings, is over in 2-3 minutes. You wonder if you imagined the whole thing.

Sometimes it errors out but shows the reservation in your account (as "on hold") and cancel itself after a day or so
1) call them and have them issue the ticket (you probably still have to pay)
2) cancel the "on hold" reservation and the award space should be available again soon thereafter

Tried to book multi stop DFW LHR ATH - same issue showed F available for 190K vs J at 180K. selected entered pass info and then it gave me this lost page. went back again and the same award had gone to 275K. Nuts happened several times same thing when I tried it the next day.

This happened to me this week....the system errored out when trying to pay for an award itinerary, but then the itinerary appeared in my account as On Hold. Tried to pay for it from there, and still gave an error.

So I called in, waited for a call back, and told the rep of the problem. She ended up having to manually re-enter the trip (which generated a new PNR), but then took my payment and the order went through.

I still haven't been assigned ticket numbers, even though the status says 'ticketed', but that's another issue.

One of them was all AA metal, another included other airlines.

The awards were only available via AA. They were part of the dynamic pricing, just lower dynamic pricing (like 79.6K miles etc).

hmm not sure about revenue flights, but sounds strange!

Yes!! I felt like either I hallucinated the prices or was just very very unlucky. In either case, the search results kept showing the good prices *until* I tried to buy one.

I ended up being able to buy one of the reservations that was put on hold... The other ones must have disappeared before I knew to check!

​​​​​​ Yes!! Glad I'm not alone in seeing this. Similar thing where F was 10K more than J, but I couldn't actually buy it.

When I called in, they seemed to be able to see the original price and just accepted payment for taxes and fees. Odd that they rebuilt your itinerary! Did they charge you the original price?

Yes, the rep first saw the original price, and the rebuilt itinerary matched it.

I've been seeing issues with booking partner awards on AA.com for months now. The award shows as available, you click on it and it says not available. You repeat the search and the flight shows up as available again. And of course when you call the AA phone number, the reps are completely clueless about this.