EhsunYazdani

So should I just probably get the AA card from citi and ty to find ways for Saver flights and occasionally use my miles for international upgrades?

sdsearch

It can be very hard to guarantee an international upgrade on an economy flight on AA. First, that only works if upgrade availability exists, and that's rare at booking time (unless perhaps you're booking very last-minute?). Second, it doesn't work at all on partner airlines. Third, AA is introducing Premium Economy (between economy and business class) but they haven't announced yet how / if that will affect how you upgrade.

Btw, all upgrades with miles on AA involve a cash "co-pay".

So if you want to fly business class internationally with AA miles, you most often have to find partner airline award flights (which is tricky, because half of them don't show up on aa.com itself), not award flights on AA metal, and book the whole flight with miles (not upgrade a cash flight).

guv1976

That's no longer the case:

https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-p...r-airlines.jsp

sdsearch

Please read that page again. Actually, it's not new, it's just that it's something that hardly works for anyone, so that's why I didn't mention it before. It says you can only upgrade on partners if you bought a full-fare ticket. No upgrades on any kind of discount fares. In most cases that means you can only upgrade if you bought a ticket that's more expensive in the lower class than a discount ticket outright in higher class!

So it's no savings at all. It's designed only for people who fly on business full fare probably because their company pays for that (but doesn't allow them to book the next cabin up), and then they can upgrade on their own to the next cabin even though the employer paid the original fare. But "more mortals" who can only afford discount tickets, they can't upgrade on partners at all.

kb9522

Why?