American Airlines has opened up a significant amount of business class award and upgrade space to Europe in 2016 and early 2017.
Specifically there is significant award space to Paris with decent space to London, Frankfurt, Milan and Zurich depending on the route. To find the space it is usually best to search the over water segment first and then figure out domestic connecting flights. You can search for flights here.
For ideas of dates, routes and space available, see the following posts:
- Amazing Business Class Award Availability USA-London! (Upgrades Available Too)
- HURRY: American Airlines Europe Business Class Awards and Upgrades Wide Open
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AA has changed it’s Award Tarvel routing options via Seattle to Europe forcing all coach 30K award ticket onto British Airways resulting in over $450.00 plus in fuel surcharge.
I’d like to travel
April 19-May 10
Seattle to Berlin(TXL), Prague, Munich. Open to others but DO NOT want to fly BA!!!
Flexible on dates and destination.
Anyone know any options to fly RT 60K on AA Sea-Germany/Czech/Budapest?Krakow NOT on British Airways suing AA Award miles.
I think you have to look more closely at those newly opened awards. Almost of the Business Saver awards from US to LHR are on British Airways. When you click reserve the bad news arrives: a mysterious $700 “tax” which is not a tax at all but a fee that American collects and presumably splits with BA. So it’s 57000 miles plus $700 for a one way ticket. Or 114,000 miles at $1400. You can buy a discounted biz ticket for about $1800. So this is no bargain.
I bet we can thank Gary Leff for this ‘news’ item, as he cranks them out periodically for other bloggers to copy.
The point here is that there is plenty of award space specifically with AA. You can (and should) change the search criteria carrier preference to ” American Airlines and American Eagle” so that you don’t see BA results.
no the point is there is little to no decent business saver awards. Living in DFW, a major AA hub, I thought there would be plenty of flights. Wrong, look at any Hawaiian island for cheap up front awards…nothing (maybe 2 dates in a year, and those on 738’s on AS) We used to have great award space on US air…since the merger, none. Going to Europe is the same crap, aa flights 110k for direct routing…i’m sorry but business saver 57k is not a bargain if it includes 2 or 3 stops and takes 24+ hours to get there. AA offers crappy flights for saver awards with overnight layovers, airport changes, basically any itinerary that no paying customer would want. The best Europe flights from DFW continue to be UA from what I have seen, decent availability on Lufthansa going through FRA with no fuel surcharges, sometimes at saver award levels…so I guess it really comes down to what your home gateway is or if your willing to tack on positioning flights in order to get a AA award at a cheaper rate (which defeats the purpose in my book)
I noticed the same with Barcelona to the US, all the new award flights are on BA routed through England so it adds tons of surcharges.
[…] such as London, Zurich and Frankfurt have decent award availability as well. When researching the Quick Deal I wrote about this, I noticed there is a decent amount of award space this Summer […]