AA award ticketing error? Try an award hold.

Last month, during our Flying by the Seat of our Points challenge, I ran into a problem booking my award home. I flew Japan Airlines first class from Tokyo to Chicago (with an onward connection to New York). In my review of that flight and during a Flying by the Seat of our Points live stream, I mentioned that I kept getting an error when trying to book online, so I put the award on hold and had my wife call to pay the taxes and ticket it. I had assumed the trouble was logging in from Morocco to buy the ticket, but JT Genter at Award Wallet reports that this is a known issue when trying to combine a partner segment and a segment on American Airlines — and that placing a hold and calling to ticket indeed the right workaround.

Again, JT reports that this has been a known issue for about a year. I hadn’t realized that when ticketing my award home last month, but sure enough just as JT describes, the issue was that I could get to the payment page and enter credit card information, but after hitting “submit” and watching the payment page spin for a while, it would simply return to the payment page without mention of an error at all no less what the error might be.

I actually ran into the same problem several times during Flying by the Seat of our Points and didn’t realize that there may be a common denominator, which appears to be booking multiple airlines on a single ticket. JT reports that when mixing two airlines, like Japan Airlines and American Airlines, on a single award ticket (as shown in the example below from Tokyo to Chicago on Japan Airlines and then Chicago to Philadelphia to Albany on American Airlines) at the partner award price (which would be 80,000 miles in this case), you’ll get the payment page error where the page will spin as though it is taking payment and then return to the payment page without mentioning what the problem may be.

The first time I ran into this problem during the challenge last month was when booking my flight from Dallas to Paris (on American Airlines) and onward on Iberia to Madrid for 57,500 miles. That award booking errored out on payment but it showed up in my American Airlines app with a PNR but no ticket. I called American Airlines and was able to pay the taxes over the phone without issue. That time I had assumed that the issue was the fact that I was booking so close to departure and thought nothing of it. My understanding now is that if that award had priced higher (like 62K or 75K miles), it probably would have ticketed without issue, but when pricing at the partner award price (57.5K miles in business class to Europe), you’ll get this error.

Then I ran into this again when trying to book a backup flight from Frankfurt to Kuala Lumpur and I eventually gave up on that, though I now believe that the problem could have been mixing two airlines on a single award.

However, I wasn’t willing to give up on the ~11hr flight from Tokyo to Chicago for my ride home from the challenge for 80,000 miles and less than $50 (which was paired with an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York JFK, though I later realized that I could have and should have paired it with a flight from Chicago to my home airport of Albany, NY!).

At the time, I assumed the problem with that one was because I was logging in from a strange location (I was trying to book while in Marrakech, Morocco). I tried a VPN to make it appear that I was booking from the US (which had worked for ticketing a LifeMiles award that had similarly errored out previously), but that didn’t do the trick for booking via American Airlines.

In my case, we were booking my flight home through my wife’s American Airlines account. When I kept running into the apparent payment error, I eventually decided to try putting the award on hold. You can do this by selecting “AAdvantage Hold” rather than a credit card when asked how you would like to pay for your trip.

American Airlines AAdvantage ordinarily allows an award hold of up to 5 days. One time years ago, I had Japan Airlines award space fail to stay held for the full five days. I further wasn’t sure how long the hold would last since I placed it within 5 days of departure (I assume the window is shorter in that case), so I immediately called my wife to ask her to call American Airlines to pay the taxes and ticket the award.

She pulled over the van with the kids inside (they were on the way to a fair) and called American Airlines. She waited on hold for more than 40 minutes until the kids were melting down about sitting on the side of the road and she had to start moving. An American Airlines agent picked up while she was driving, but being in the middle of nowhere meant that the call dropped before she could get it ticketed.

The next agent with whom she spoke insisted that they needed my American Airlines AAdvantage number in order for my wife to pay the taxes and issue the ticket. Remember that we were using miles from her account, so that didn’t make sense. Unfortunately, the agent insisted. My wife tried calling me, but I was literally at the check-in counter in Marrakech speaking with the check-in desk agent while checking in for my flight from Marrakech to Frankfurt and I couldn’t answer the phone.

And so my wife ended up having to call American Airlines a third time and had to wait on hold yet again. Of course that next agent didn’t even ask for my AAdvantage number, but rather simply took her credit card number and payment and the award ticketed shortly thereafter.

JT reports that this is indeed the way to handle the issue if you run into an award that fails to go through on the payment screen.

To be clear, this is different from a phantom award space issue. When you run into phantom award space, you won’t get all the way to the payment page before the system errors out and says that the flights are no longer available. Rather, this is a situation where you select flights and enter passenger info and get all the way to the final payment page and hit “submit” only for the page to spin with an AA logo as though it is about to go to a confirmation page only to return to the payment page with no indication or explanation of the error. If you run into that situation, simply go back and select “Award hold”. That should give you a confirmation code. Then, just call American Airlines and you should be able to pay for the ticket with an agent over the phone.

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