Re: Couple of AAdvantage questions from a newbie to it
I'm keen to get a QF premium cabin award on the A380 in about 50 weeks' time. There is some availability with QF but I can't book it with AA. I'm reluctant to part with so many points when I can I do it so much cheaper with AA.
Two questions.
First, if I do book the award I want with QF I'm happy to bear the 5k penalty of cancelling to re-book the same award but through AA. Is there any method to when my cancelled award seat would be returned to inventory, so that I could snap it up with AA?
Second, if option one fails, how common (50% likely, 20% likely etc.) is a new award seat (either a whole new seat or one resulting from somoene else cancelling) likely to pop up over the course of the next 50 weeks? I recognise the answer to this question is likely to be subjective but still interested peoples' thoughts.
It seems to happen regularly so your chances are reasonable but there can be a delay of a few hours or even days for the inventory to return. ExpertFlyer alerts can help but they're not in real time so it could be returned and someone else beats you to it.
Also consider a JASA booking which usually means there are no point penalities when you cancel.
I've certainly seen J and P awards become available later. My guess is that it's other awards being cancelled but there's no way of knowing. If your date are pretty flexible then it could happen but it's a bit of a long shot.
I got my award seat. It was the solitary one available on the flight I wanted and had been quietly sitting in the corner for 35-odd days waiting for me to snap it up when AA opened it up.
I found it yesterday when there were the Sabre problems but I did find a couple of things along the way that may be helpful.
Firstly, the furtherest date (ie. the most distant date that an award could be searched for) became available at 1pm WST. The date itself (ie. when AA's site moved from, in my case 2 July 2014 to 3 July) was 12am yesterday. However, on reflection, I suspect this was a computer timing thing and that if I'd fired up my computer at exactly the same time, but was located in the US, 3 July may actually not have been available.
But, even though 3 July was available to search and it returned flight results, every time I selected a flight combination (two flights in total) I got an error message saying 'the flight you selected is no longer available' which was plain wrong. ExpertFlyer and Qantas still showed the seats as available and the same flights continued to show up as being available, even when the engine said they weren't. Again, I don't know if this was a Sabre issue or not.
So I phoned AA in Fiji to tell them my problem. Their first response was, of course, to blame it on Sabre but I persisted. The agent spoke with technical support, twice, and then, I kid you not, told me that AA hadn't loaded any fares or awards for 3 July and that they wouldn't be available until, wait for it, 20 August. In the very same breath the agent told me that the engine only goes 330 days in the future. The agent was adamant it was both 20 August for 3 July bookings and 330 days. There was no telling her otherwise or getting her to see her stupidity.
As it turned out, I tried again about 9pm WST last night and managed to get the seat. Today I phoned AA in Fiji to tell the agent (via another agent) just how wrong her information was and that if I'd waited until 20 August when she was so convinced the booking would be available, it would almost certainly have been gone.
