American Transatlantic First Class Awards Next Summer

Lucky,
Do you see any relationship between the coming merger (US Air/AA) and the wholesale "marketing" of points by Barclay pre-merger? Is AA's response to the flood of points out there restricted of space available?

likely a timing error since it seems only to happen on Tuesday's at the planning horizon. Now I'm sure they will fix that.

@ Russ -- Nah, it's a trend we've been seeing for years now, and it has gotten worse and worse. I think it just follows the overall industry trend -- airlines are as profitable as they've ever been, so they don't see much reason to release award space.

Did yo ucheck to see whether returns are possilbe?

@ beachfan -- Not any that I see. But you can always redeem a different type of award for the return, like Iberia, airberlin, Finnair, etc.

@ beachfan -- Fix it? Not if we book all the seats first. 😉

How would you rate their F against BA F?

Lucky,

any reason that the same flights on AA are 125K but they are 180K on USAIR?

@ michael -- Where are you seeing the 180K price and for what route?

@ Lantean -- The 777-300ER has wifi and a more spacious hard product, though not as private. I'd say BA first class gets the slide edge in terms of amenities, but I think for the most part they're fairly comparable.

Lucky, I noticed similar thing but a different date for me. I was looking for 3 or 4 seats from ATL to LON and the only date that had AA availability was June 1st. I managed to snag 4 seats in BIZ from MIA-MAD-LHR with connections for 3 from ATL and 1 for me from PHX. There was also availability of 3 seats in econ for ATL-ORD-LHR on AA metal. That was about all I could find on AA. Of course there was plenty on BA but I didn't want to pay the fuel surcharges.

There are some days with space on first to/from South America, with the same patterns, on next june, too.

Don't see any direct flights from LAX to LHR. Only connecting flights.

@ Luis -- Someone else has booked them in the meantime apparently, because they were there earlier.

Direct, LAX-LHR, on a saver award is akin to capturing the elusive Sasquatch.

@ Aaron -- Hah, well said!

@ Lucky

Is it normal for the BA web site to barely show any availability on AA metal when using avios?

@ Vinod -- They do sometimes not show all award availability, in which case it should still be bookable by phone.

Something strange is going on with the AA search engine. Booked JFK-LHR in F (thanks, btw :-)) but need a flight from LAX to JFK. I can see the space online for all 4 morning flights in F from LA but the agent on the phone can't! Spoke to 4 different agents! Any ideas how to tackle this? I have a flight with connections on hold but it would entail being on a red-eye and spending the day in NYC, which I don't want to do (ideally).

Sad state of affairs. And yet the bloggers continue to defend AA. You can place this squarely on the US Airways guys.

It was never this bad.

@ Greg -- I agree it's ridiculous how little award space they have, they're taking it to an extreme. At the same time there are much better uses of American miles, Cathay Pacific still releases a good amount of award space, and American's redemption rates to Asia on partners are less than half of United's in many cases, so I feel like we can't really complain, all things considered.

Looks like only BA is available and AA is already full for JFK-LHR. Is it BA still worth redeeming for the first class product?

@ alix -- I guess it depends what the alternative is. Just reviewed it yesterday, so you can decide for yourself:
https://onemileatatime.com/review-british-airways-first-class-747-new-york-london/

I hate paying fuel surcharges, but it is a decent transatlantic product.

It's also odd that they would release award space in first on a 777-200 almost a year out, when there's a good chance that by next June, those first cabins will have been eliminated altogether and replaced with an expanded business cabin retrofit. So then they'll be processing involuntary downgrades. Why not just release business space rather than F, if anything, and avoid the headache.

@Chris - that's an interesting point. What type of compensation do they typically give out for involuntary downgrades?

I'd put 5 seats in First on hold for AA 106 on June 30th the day your wrote this post (thanks!) but decided not to ticket it; that date doesn't work out for us after all. Pity, it would've been a great start to our family's European vacation! In any case, I cancelled the hold and the availability returned right back - so if someone's interested, snap it up 🙂