e-tickets on aa.com: for which OW carriers?
 

Is aa.com able to issue e-tickets for all one world carriers? I remember there used to be problems even issueing BA tickets. Anyone tried to book finnair tickets on aa.com and received paper or e-tickets lately?

I don't know about 'all', but I have purchased etickets on LA,IB and BA.

I have also e-ticketed QF flights on AA.com.

E-Ticket availability is both carrier and destination dependent. You cannot use e-ticket if any of your desinations cannot accept e-ticket. Many airports in India, Sri Lanka and some central Asia airports are not e-ticketable, amongst others. I think aa.com could e-ticket AY flights provided that your destination is e-ticketable.

AA.com has a list of eligible carriers that it can sell flights on and lists which carriers are e-ticket eligible (if the destination is e-ticket eligible).

I have purchased AY flights through AA as an AA e-ticket, not through AA.com, but it should be no different.

All 8 OW carriers can be e-ticketed. But there are dozens of airports that are not e-ticket capable (including some in the US!). This forces the entire ticket to be paper. Finally, sometimes codeshares affect e-ticketability. Last year I could get e-ticket on AY but not on BA codeshare on AY (apparently AY's computers couldn't access BA's system for e-ticket checkin). These glitches are slowly being solved and e-tickets are 99% available (and work very well -- just be sure to have your ticket number written down, I've had to produce that a dozen times now, and would have been denied boarding if I had not known my ticket number).

Is there a list of these somewhere?

And/or can you see that an airport is not e-ticketable (say, on aa.com) BEFORE you commit to the purchase? Or do you only find out after the fact? (This might be an issue if there were an alternate US airport partical for you that IS e-tickeable, and you anticipated you'd likely need reissuing several times.)

Not sure about the US, but at least BA publishes their e-Ticket exceptions here.

actually, does the credit card holder have to be travelling, when using an e-ticket from aa.com?
I would like to book a ticket for someone who doesnt have a US based credit card. It was no problem to use the Check In automates with another person's BA-miles card, even though her number wasn't in the booking. So I assume it should work with any card (European Credit card) that has a matching name...

You can buy a ticket for someone else using your credit card

It depends on the ticket. AA does not require the credit card used to purchase the ticket to be produced. But some other airlines do. For example, BA requires that prior to flying the first leg of the ticket, the credit card used to pay for the ticket be produced. So if you buy a ticket on aa.com and the first sector is BA, then the credit card might be needed before travel is allowed (I say might because I suspect BA has some leniency with this policy, but have never tested it). Many other airlines also have this requirement, not just BA.

IB is *very* strict about this, but the checking is random.

I've never seen a list of a way to find out before the fact. But all of the "top 500" airports in the US are e-ticket capable; probably all airports served by mainline AA flights, for example. It is a few of the AE and AC airports where this is an issue, and mostly ones that have a single flight per day (and presumably no nearby alternate airports). As an aside, none of these airports is capable of reissuing any OWE ticket (in fact only about a dozen of the major AA aiport ticket counters can do a OWE reissue). Staying with an e-ticket is a big help.

does aa.com mention this anywhere when booking a flight there?

I'm a little late with this but I thought that it would be of interest anyway.