It appears that American Airlines tried to get rid of their (superior) old award search tool once and for all, but there continues to be a workaround. As many people may already know, since last year American has had two different AAdvantage award search tools. There's the old one, which I love: It's easy to…
Continue reading: New Workaround For Old American AAdvantage Award Search
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
I am wondering, once this loophole is closed - will this be the end of award charts for American?
AA - "Thank you Lucky for showing us this error, we are now removing it, to reward you for bringing this to our attention we offer you one free check bag on your next flight (one-way only)"
You bloggers are the reason why half the things are being removed by AA. Now you revealed this new trick which they overlooked and it will be removed soon. you need to keep certain secrets and chill out dude.
@Ben, I appreciate you showing the workaround to the old AA engine but it's very cumbersome and quite misleading: if you do a multi-city search, the engine asks you for more miles because it adds up miles for every leg, instead of showing a much smaller number of miles for total trip when using the old engine... It kind of defeats the purpose...You might as well use the new engine, as bad and as it is...
Forbes reports that American may pledge the AA program as collateral for a government loan. The same article also questions "it is unclear how AAdvantage could function without the airline." I do as well. I, a lifetime Gold member, also question how much value the AA program has left after so many years of screwing its members.
Lucky didn't 'let the cat out of the bag'. I read 4 travel bloggers every day and every one of them mentioned this workaround. Tips and tricks I find to be the most valuable part of the bloggers education to us readers.
I use 'multi city search' all the time and if just doing a regular roundtrip I have not found it to be more miles. Since AA prices award tix as one ways, 2 one ways still price out like they would have if you used regular award search.
And I agree that the new award search method is much harder to find what you want at a glance. Have to do lots of clicks to see if they have the level of award you want.
@Talent Hacker Have you read the title and subtitle of this blog? "One Mile at a Time: TIPS, TRICKS and travel."
@Lucky Thanks for living up to the original intention of your blog. It's great.
There are deals to be had. A U.S.-to-Europe trip at the still-available “old” saver rate is 115,000 miles round-trip. But if you click on the page with the newer saver rate, that same trip is 84,000 miles round-trip. That’s a 31,000 miles savings by simply clicking on the newer page. AND less inventory on old search tool, more inventory on new search tool. They are trying their best on getting everyone moving over.
That's interesting... when I tried to book one way trip from ATL to MAD using multi-city "trick" on the old engine I was asked 80K miles instead of 55.5K...
I wonder how did you manage to get 84K for the round trip using the :new" engine? From were to where?