AA Awards with Etihad Points and Flight changes
 

I couldn’t find a thread on using Etihad miles on American Airlines flights, so posting my question here.

I want to book a flight from JFK to SFO in First Z class, but I’m wondering if this flight might get cancelled because they can’t fill the flight and move everyone to an earlier/later flight.

Anyway, does anyone know what Etihad would do if your American flight changes or canceled?

Not sure if anyone has any experience with this, and whether the partner airline can guarantee the same First Z cabin on the changed flight. Thanks for the feedback.

My understanding is that you'd need to find a First sAAver award (which is difficult now that AA doesn't really have easy Award searching), AND it has to be 100% AA (not sure if American Eagle, etc. counts) for Etihad to find/book.

Second, I'd imagine Etihad would do like AA (if you were doing vice versa--booking Etihad flight with AA miles), and the miles would be returned to you if the AA flight was cancelled.

Changes would probably be difficult unless they could get AA to open sAAver First award space on a diff flight.

I'm trying to use Etihad Miles to book on AA from BRU-DFW in May and I have no idea how to get this to work, only routing it's giving me for the dates I need have 2 BA segments.

Is there a matrix or something I can use to figure out the booking? Transferring over AmEx MR to Etihad assuming I'll be able to book something.

My understanding is that in order to book AA via Etihad miles, you need to find that sAAver award on AA first. But, since AA got rid of the award chart, sorta kinda, you'll need to manually sift through the new web interface to try to find the fare. AND it has to be on 100% operated by AA flights, AFAIK. I do not know if the flights "american eagle operated as AA" or whatever the language is, counts as 100% operated by AA.

The one time I tried to find something, they had nothing from ALB, but stuff from PHL, ORD, etc. (almost all the ALB-whatever segments are "operated by ..." flights).

Again, I'm not 100% sure about this, but I googled and found some older articles that seemed to imply this is how it works.

Thanks, everything I find tries to route me through London on BA metal BRU-LHR-ORD, can't find anything on AA metal except CDG-DFW but they want 300k a ticket on AA so definitely not a Saver award.

I'm not sure what fare class AA has for "saaver" awards, but if you can find out, AND you have ExpertFlyer access, you may be able to go that route.

All the airlines make it very difficult now (IMO). Same with Krisflyer trying to book United awards, or KE miles trying to book Delta awards. Lack of awards charts and dynamic pricing muck with things.

Just found this on the AA forum, so this could help quite a bit (albeit have to search and pay for an expertflyer sub):

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/33745694-post1724.html

Looks like you can search for the T and U class tickets to see what's there.