American Airlines Not Showing British Airways Flights
It seems like something is wrong with the American Airlines website, because it won’t show ANY partner awards for British Airways flights. That sentence says it all. This should hopefully be a temporary glitch, but here’s what we’re seeing…or NOT seeing.
I searched 10 different airports out of the U.S. and couldn’t find a single British Airways flight available for partner awards on AA.com.
The clearest example is Denver, which does not offer any direct flights to London with American Airlines. Thus, filtering for “nonstop” would show only BA-operated flights. There are months and months of nothing.
Lest we think it’s just flights out of the U.S., I searched other countries.
Lest we think it’s just flights out of the U.S., I searched other countries.No direct flights available at all for any date to Moscow, yet BA should be running this.
I also searched the AA website for British Airways partner awards to the following countries:
- China
- Ghana
- Hong Kong
- India
- Israel
- Japan
- Jordan
- Kenya
- Morocco
There’s nothing available for all of 2022.
Final Thoughts
It looks like American Airlines is not showing partner awards for British Airways flights on its website at this time. We were able to find awards for all of the other partners that you can normally book online. This issue seems to be only for British Airways award flights. If something changes, we’ll let you know.
I’ve also reached out to AA on Twitter to see if they can provide any updates. If they reply, I’ll add it here.
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Since 1/4/22, BA award space has also not been displaying on the Alaska Airlines website. This is probably a problem with BA, not AA.
It’s also not showing any USA-HKG nonstop on CX. 1-stop trips on CX are still shown.
Keep in mind that BA just went through a complete software transition on its award system. What was supposed to be a weekend turned into a month. When functionality returned, it was piecemeal. This might be a result of that. And, keep in mind that AA itself went through a major software replacement in mid-2021. Many bugs are still being worked out.
If the issue is not a result of these software updates, read on . . .
Perhaps this is more pronounced on AA, but visibility of partner award flights is incomplete on any One World airline’s web site. Some are better than others. Purportedly, Qantas provides the best visibility — significantly better. So, a work around is to register an account with Qantas solely for this visibility. Once you have the flights, you would need to . . . ugh . . . call an AA reservation agent. Because the flight was not bookable online, you would ask for the agent-assist fee to be waived.
Now, AA reservation agents themselves might or might not be able to see the award flight availability that you can see on Qantas. But, word is that if you give them all of the flight information and given enough time, they’ll find it. In spite of this, a work around is to call AA reservations on its Australia dial-in number. Somehow, those agents have the better visibility. Who know? Just go with it.
Hope this helps.
Joe – I’ll respond by saying this availability was there last week on AA’s website, which is post-updates that you mentioned.
For sure a good thing. BA is a shthole airline that flies to a shthole airport.
I would consider this a feature.
Muhahaha. Your comment actually made me giggle. I agree, BA just isn’t an airline that I’d personally want to fly but I do wish the info was there on AA for those who could benefit from it.
Maybe a good thing since BA puts those huge fees on the AA tickets.
Agree, fees and advance seat charges, hard to take. But BA has been reliably flying from Washington DC to LHR/others, so that’s almost priceless.
Of course none of us want to be on phone hold, but a call should also reveal information. If anyone needs to book with miles, a call might work. I’ve also found based on award booking with Delta and United that the agents – if they want to, and they have so far – find award travel that isn’t showing on the websites, and the reverse, need you to tell them the flights that you’re seeing to book awards. Most recent example, IAD-LHR-FCO was showing on AA as BA award travel we called b/c we had 4 FF accounts, and agent needed us to say flight numbers she said she didn’t see that flight, yada-yada. Who knows but folks with hands-on agent experience what the real story is.