American Airlines Website Full of “Phantom” Malaysia Airlines Awards

If you’ve recently searched for AAdvantage award seats on the American Airlines website, you may have noticed that there are lots of Economy and Business Class award seats showing as available on Malaysia Airlines flights to & from Australia.

Malaysia Airlines is a Oneworld partner of both American Airlines and Qantas. So, this may give you the impression that there are lots of Malaysia Airlines seats available to book using either American Airlines AAdvantage miles or Qantas Frequent Flyer points. Sadly, some of this is too good to be true.

Malaysia Airlines does often have reasonable award availability on its flights from Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur. On some flights, if booking far enough in advance, you can get up to two Malaysia Airlines Business Class award seats using points or miles with any Oneworld airline – including Qantas points. But the wide-open Malaysia Airlines award availability shown on the American Airlines website is sadly not real.

Let’s look at an example. If we search for award availability from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur on the Qantas website for July 2022 – a peak travel period with extremely limited award availability – very few seats appear to be available:

But if we do the same search on the American Airlines website, there appears to be a lot more award availability:

If we then click on a specific date, the American Airlines website shows multiple Malaysia Airlines flights with award seats apparently available.

After clicking on one of these options, you’ll be taken to a page showing the full flight details and a breakdown of the cost.

But if you try to continue to the next page to complete the payment for this flight, you’ll be redirected back to the flight results page. This error message will also appear at the top of the screen:

This is because this particular Malaysia Airlines “availability” shown on the American Airlines website was unfortunately just “phantom” space that doesn’t really exist. It’s displayed by mistake when you search for award flights, and is not actually bookable.

Not all Malaysia Airlines award availability on the American Airlines website is phantom. Some flights are actually available for booking using AAdvantage miles – but many are not. This is a known bug with the American Airlines website that has already been an issue for at least several months.

If in doubt, you can cross-check award availability by searching for Oneworld Award availability on the Japan Airlines website. (You’ll need to create a free JAL Mileage Bank account to search for award availability.) If the Japan Airlines website shows that an award seat/s is available on Malaysia Airlines, it should also be possible to book this using Qantas points, AAdvantage miles or any other Oneworld frequent flyer program’s currency.

Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Found reward seats on AA website but not showing on QF website

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.