BA limiting the number of awards available to AAdvantage (and other partners)
 

New poster here, I just wanted to comment on reduced availability on BA club world/club suites through AA search engine. Having been following availability and booking BA J flights to Europe through AA the past couple years, it seems BA has stopped giving AA guaranteed availability for award J seats on their metal. Previously, they seemed to make 2 club world seats available on every flight. They usually got booked within the first 2 days of aa’s flight booking maximums, but if you got in on the first day a flight was made available, you could, and I did, get them. These were for SAN-LHR long haul connecting to club Europe. Now, when I go on to search at the 331 day window, there is nothing on any day except for Y available, and often not on my desired flight from San-Lhr I don’t think it has to do with Avios inventory getting used up in their earlier window, as many of the flights still have j or PE availability showing in Avios that simply don’t populate in Aa’s search system. Did BA make an change to not give a guaranteed number of seats per flight to aadvantage customers, or is this some kind of IT issue? I would suspect the former, unfortunately. Have seen the exact same change in J or PE availability being nonexistent via Alaska mileage plan as well.

This change seems to have been made as of 3-4 weeks ago. It also coincided with BA announcing a frequency increase from 1x-2x daily on the San-Lhr route, which makes it doubly frustrating.

There definitely was never a guarantee of this availability (even if you did regularly see it). I'd suggest just to continually keep checking for the routes/dates you want. Availability can open up at any given point in time.

I believe BA release the initial tranche of reward seats (2 in Club World) 364 days in advance. So I think they will mostly be gone on popular routes if you are looking 331 days ahead.
Other seats may become available after that, which is route and load dependant.

I am pretty sure it is 355 days that BA opens its calendar and releases seats. Which means of course as you state that BA and some other award programs have access to the seats before they are available for booking by AA. So there is no guarantee obviously that the seats BA guarantees to release at calendar open will be there by the time AA can book them.

In all fairness to BA though they are a lot more generous with giving award seats at regular levels to members of other OW programs than AA is.

BA will make award seats available on most days almost every route, same for most other OW members while AA will make every seat available to AA members on AA.COM but not to other OW members. Perhaps other OW airlines should follow suit and exclude AA members from redeeming for most of their flights and only offer a minute amount of award seats the same way AA does.

A similar observation was recently discussed in the AS forum.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/alas...-vanished.html

Welcome to FT!

I think it’s a glitch with BA. As the OP states, I can see J reward seats available on Avios on BA.com in the August/September time frame which means they should be available on AA miles. However if you go through the booking process using Avios on BA.com, the system won’t let you book them. I would keep trying, it will likely get fixed at some point.

I personally have zero interest in paying $1000 in fuel surcharges for a mileage redemption so would never look at long haul BA flights anyway.

This is like saying "I personally have zero interest in drinking alcohol" when someone is asking for a whiskey recommendation.

With respect, neither particularly relevant nor useful towards the OPs question or issue. Clearly, they have interest in using BA awards.

To the OP, I have noticed the same issue. BA has had a series of recent IT glitches, so it's likely that.

No love loss there. Any "award" ticket that has $1500 in fees isn't an award ticket it's a highly discounted ticket that you can get for 80K miles and not earn miles credit.

What you're not mentioning is that BA award pricing (and AA award pricing for partners) is static. AA award pricing for AAdvantage members is dynamic. So yes, an AA award member can always get a Business Class seat to Tokyo, but might have to pay 450,000 miles for it:

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...14b8fad6da.png

Then you are missing the bigger picture. The cost of accumulating Avios is very inexpensive in comparison to accumulating AA miles due to the larger credit card bonuses that are available more frequently than AA bonuses, and the ability to transfer in from other programs also offering larger bonuses. The Avios required for a BA flight is typically less than half that required for equivalent AA flights and frequently much less than that. Availability on BA is far superior. When you consider all of that you will find that the $1,000 in fuel surcharges for a J class flight is actually a very good deal. It’s all about the total cost of accumulating the miles plus surcharges, not just the surcharges.

450k for a one-way flight in J? There are only 3 seats left at that price - you better hurry up and book before they're gone! This brings back memories of an interview on FlyerTalk with the then-chief of AAdvantage some 20 years ago, back when there were SAAver awards (what most people would consider regular awards), and AAnytime awards that could be used to select up to the very last seat of revenue inventory. The AAdvantage guy said only half-way tongue-in-cheek: "Every seat is an award seat."

People in the UK just look at it as "I'm flying in refundable J for the cash price of non-refundable Y". Miles / Avios are just something you get from business travel, credit cards and shopping. Add the guaranteed award space on every flight and it's a fair deal overall. (one that BA would never allow without surcharges on award tickets)

In any event, I have learned that the "surcharges are outrageous, I'm never flying BA/VS/LH/etc." crowd can't be convinced. Let them moan and look for unicorns (international premium cabins on AA, DL, etc.), keeping BA's inventory open for the rest of us.

+1. Most of my Avios are transfers from Amex with a bonus of 30-40%. With the advent of RFS which has some pros and cons I can pretty much get BA J anytime I want from my local international airport for 80k Avios (off peak) and $350 one way in surcharges. With the 30-40% transfer bonus that is pretty close to AA saver if you can find it. And if you hold the Chase BA card you get a $200 credit back per booking (up to 3x a year).

I booked five people on BA J on the same flight next year to London one way. It was split across two BAEC accounts and two Chase CCs. Each person was booked on their own booking (all adults). So I got five folks on the same flight, in J for 80k Avios and net $150 in surcharges per person + 2 $95 in Chase annual fees. I doubt I could get anything close to that on AA. YMMV