Between those 3 search engines you should almost always be able to
find award availability searching through dozens of partner airlines.
Not exact matches
Don't waste your time trying to
find award availability online - just call American Airlines to
search and book.
You might
find it helpful to begin by
searching for one - way flights and only later attempt to make a round - trip or multi-city reservation once you know all the dates that have
award availability.
I don't know where you're flying from, but I
searched availability in July — a peak travel time — from Chicago to Honolulu, and
found award tickets typically available for between 60,000 and 70,000 miles round - trip.
We
searched flights leaving Honolulu on American or Alaska using American's
award booking engine and found «SAAver Award» — their low - tier category — availability into San Jose, CA on the
award booking engine and
found «SAAver
Award» — their low - tier category — availability into San Jose, CA on the
Award» — their low - tier category —
availability into San Jose, CA on the 30th.
Searching with flexible dates allows you to
find the best
availability of Saver
Awards, which are typically available for half of the miles a Standard
Award requires.
Finding seats can be extremely difficult of course, but we do the legwork for you on a
search for
award availability.
If you're trying to
find award availability on a OneWorld airline BritishAirways.com is the best place to start — the airline may be pretty useless at most things but its site is great for OneWorld
award searches.
When I
searched for
availability from the US to Auckland with United on Aeroplan's website, I
found a lot of United
award availability for flights 5 + months out and decent
availability for flights only a couple of months out but it wasn't the kind of
availability I liked.
Note: To
find Etihad
awards that are available to book using AAdvantage Miles you need to look out for Etihad Guest
availability (the first column in any results from an
award search).
Last,
search for
award availability on the route (s) that you
found in an airline
search engine that provides the best results.
The last step in the
award search flight process is to confirm the flight you
found on delta.com or klm.com has
availability on Korean Air.
I simply
found Delta
award availability on Korean's
search engine and had the Korean Air agent add the DCA to JFK and DTW to DCA to our itinerary.
I recommend using British Airways and / or Qantas «
search engine to
find Cathay Pacific
award availability.
To
find award availability with JAL you can
search on their own website or use British Airways»
search function.
The Asiana website does not bring in partners flights on
award searches, so you need to
find availability on another Star Alliance partner's website such as United, and then call to book.
Similarly, if you are booking an
award with Alaska Airlines, you might prefer to use their own
award search rather than Singapore's to
find availability.
I
find United.com to have the most naturally feeling interface for
searching award availability of all the programs.
TAM's
award availability doesn't appear on AA.com, so you'll have to
search on your own — or speak with an AA agent — to
find award availability to these smaller cities.
After a few days of
searching here and there, I
found first class
award availability from LAX - ICN (Seoul).
But the problem is worse because AA.com is likely only going to show British Airways flights because the other options aren't even available on AA
award searches (see the Master Chart of Finding Airline Award Availabil
award searches (see the Master Chart of
Finding Airline
Award Availabil
Award Availability).
Since I already
searched the American Airlines website for
award availability, I expect the exact same three flights I
found on the last step to be available now.