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UPDATE: Trying the search over and over again seems to be the solution. A quick-ish way to do that is to to click the tabs for different days and then click back. See: How to find AA award space on BA.com.
Yesterday I tried to book a short distance one-way award flight on American Airlines. It didn’t go as I had hoped. AA had good award prices for the flight (7.5K economy, 15K business class), but they also wanted $75 for the close-in booking fee. Ouch.
My usual go-to for avoiding those close-in fees is British Airways. I searched for the flight on BA.com and got… nothing.
I tried a number of times. Still nothing. I even tried using a VPN to set my location to London, opened an incognito browser, and searched again (hey, you never know what might work). Nothing.
Iberia’s website found the flight without any trouble. But Iberia requires round-trip awards when booking oneworld partners, and I needed only a one-way. I priced a one-way business class with a throw-away economy return at around 17K. Not too bad, but all of my Avios points are in my British Airways account. And try as I might, I couldn’t get a point transfer to go through. I tried from the BA site. Then I tried from the Iberia site. I would have tried from Avios.com, but that site now requires not just a UK address, but a UK phone number as well. It shouldn’t be this hard.
I called British Airways Executive Club (1-800-452-1201) and was happily surprised when an agent answered the phone right away (I was expecting a long wait). Unfortunately, she couldn’t see the award space either. She told me that it’s a known issue and that the problem comes and goes. It was her opinion that it is more likely to work for customers than for the agents in the call center (Um… OK…). Her recommendation? Try, try again.
A few blogs reported this issue last summer (here and here, for example), but I assumed that the problem must have been fixed by now. Right? Apparently not. At least, it’s not currently working for me.
In my case, this may have actually been a good thing. My BA Avios woes led me to check the paid price for the flight which I had just assumed would be sky high. Not so. The flight was just $92. So, I dug around my stash of pay with points options and booked the paid flight (I used CNB points in this case).
Still, the BA failure is troubling. BA Avios are worth a lot less to me if AA flights are no longer an option. But this was just one example. I checked a couple of other routes and found the same pattern. A few examples hardly proves that it’s universal, but it’s not good.
What has your experience been? Have you been able to book AA award flights through British Airways lately? Please comment below.
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BA:
“We Are currently experiencing a technical problem displaying AA reward flights”
This has been going on for days if not weeks.
AA and BA couldn’t care less
This has been an ongoing issue off and on for a few years. BA has posted an alert however this time and it is the first time I am seen them mention the error. This message appears on the page when you are booking flights w Avios “There is a technical problem with American Airlines’ reward flight availability which American Airlines is currently working to identify and resolve.
While this problem is ongoing, to book a reward flight on American Airlines, please contact your local contact centre. We apologise for the inconvenience.”
Yep, same thing here. I have wasted a lot of time and still can’t get the flights to show up. I have gone back and forth 50 times to different days, but no luck. This used to be my favorite use of points, but they obviously have had issues for quite some time and don’t feel to need to fix it. Expert Flyer shows inventory.
When I search those same flights on Alaska, they show up every time. I guess I will have to call them to see if they show the availability. Anyone else have any other ideas?
After about 15 tries going back and forth between dates to get DFW-FLL round trip to show up, I finally got it to show but when I selected both flights and hit continue it just brought me back to the search page. Anyone run into this?
This is ridiculous, such a waste of time. I have been looking for tickets to PHX for about ten days now and I know they are available for almost the entire week I need to travel. Only a couple of times has one of the days appeared, just for the date when I can’t travel.
I have been a fan of Avios since the beginning, but what good are they now if they can’t be used?
Just refresh by going back to the previous page and hit search. It took me 8-9 times but eventually the flts showed up. Only took about 2 minutes.
I had the same problem over and over till I finally got fed up and sold my 50,000 BA miles for $400.00 . I kept reading about how you could use Ba miles for AA award flights ,but that was a crock of bull ,I never once got to use the miles for even cheap aa flights when award flights were available,so people are being misinformed, even when Calling the BA phone # ,I got nowhere with them either because they claimed there were no award flights available, but I could see them on the AA website.
yup, no AA flights from West Coast gateways to Hawaii shown yesterday. Ended up using AA miles 1 way since there was a convenient connection from my hometown airport (and I haven’t passed Iberia Avios 101 yet)
I had a similar but different issue when I was booking a flight last week. There was NO availability on AA.com, but BA showed flights (“7 seats available” actually). I tried booking the flight 4-5 times and it never worked, I put in payment details etc, but in the end it errored out. I can also say switching dates seemed to kinda work, finally showing availability, but alas, they wouldn’t book. I figured it was a glitch since there was nothing on AA.com. So lots of problems on BA.com. Ended up going via UA with my first ever “train as the first leg” trip ZFV (Philly) departure.
I was told by one BA csr that AA does not release all award space to BA.
[…] morning I asked “Is BA unable to see American Airlines award space?” I had found an AA saver award that I wanted to book. And I knew space was available. […]
What worked when I had this issue was clicking on other days of the week calendar that come up and then coming back to the day I actually wanted. The refreshed query without leaving the page brought it up after the third or fourth try. Did this trick a few times on multiple occasions with success. Hope it helps others.
Thanks! Nick and I just tried this and after several attempts we were able to get award space to show up! I’ll write this up as a new post.
I used the same ‘trick’ and it worked! Took more than just a few clicks around other dates, tho’. Thanks for the tip.
Airline loyalty programs are pointless now. We already shifted to other means. If a big airline starts really wanting loyalty, this is the time to capture the market.
Yep, i’ve noticed this same problem for direct AA flights I’ve been trying to book for the past two weeks where there’s plenty of space on AA.com but nothing on BA. I keep going back every couple days but haven’t found a window where it works yet.
I have experienced this problem regularly and repeatedly over the last 2+ years. The telephone agents are unable to help, and when querying the BA social media team about it I’ve just received snarky responses about how I should be flying BA instead of AA …