Questions and Answers

Anybody else having trouble with phantom space on aa.com?

Am trying to get a friend home PVG-BNA next October. Our date just opened up on Sunday. Website shows PVG-DFW-BNA routing at 70K but when I select that flight the website puts me right back on the page listing flights though the flight I just selected no longer displays. Called AA and they said the flights are available at the standard price of 140K, not the saver price. Have an itinerary on hold PVG-HKG-ORD but still need the last leg. Saw it opened up in economy today for 7.5K but had the same problem. It’s only available for an extra 20K miles.

Is this normal when booking this far ahead on AA?

Have you tried BA or AS’s search tools for DFW-BNA and ORD-BNA? If they dont see it, I doubt it’s bookable on AA.

I don’t remember ever seeing phantom space on AA metal, but booking right at the window can be dicey because things aren’t always fully loaded, etc.

I did look on BA after calling AA and of course it didn’t show the award. It never occurred to me that AA would show phantom space for their own flights as I’d never heard of that happening, though I’m not booking tickets all year long like many folks here do.

I’ve set an EF alert so hopefully something will open up soon.

When earlier this year I booked flights for an early 2017 BKK-HKG-JFK-BNA trip using AA Saver Business awards (before the devaluation – 55k AA miles/leg/pp), the JFK-BNA segment only opened up 5 days after the BKK-HKG-JFK. It literally opened up 3 hours before my 5 day courtesy held reservation was about to expire. Fortunately, the AA agent managed to attach it to the existing reservation (which was on CX by the way). Because of the CX flight, I of course did not have to pay the agent fee (since award on CX is not bookable on AA.com). So it might open up before you need to decide whether to keep the reservation or not.

Yep, I got an EF alert this morning. Weird thing is, by the time I was able to check it, the flight we really wanted didn’t show as available. But the next later flight is available in F. Her hold ends Friday night so that timeline agrees with what you saw, [USER=1592]@Daniel B[/USER]. And like you her first 2 segments are on CX.

Recently I had EF alerts for AA SAAver flights and it took a day or so for the flights to actually show up on AA.com and then as soon as they appeared, they were gone – sold out! People have told me to phone AA at the first EF alert, even if they do not show on the website and book by phone. I have no inside information but perhaps the long dearth of SAAver awards has huge numbers of passengers chasing a few award seats.

[QUOTE=”MidSouth Skier, post: 23446, member: 184″]Yep, I got an EF alert this morning. Weird thing is, by the time I was able to check it, the flight we really wanted didn’t show as available. But the next later flight is available in F. Her hold ends Friday night so that timeline agrees with what you saw, [USER=1592]@Daniel B[/USER]. And like you her first 2 segments are on CX.[/QUOTE]
That is great though that the later flight is available. At the end of the 5 day courtesy hold, if the earlier flight still does not show availability, I would just ticket it with the later but available flight and change it later when availability shows up. As you of course all know, change of that nature is free with AA (I have done it many times). For that above mentioned itinerary of ours, we (3 of us), were originally booked on 3 different LGA-BNA flights (because of availability issues at the time of booking), but over the course of the next few months I managed to rebook all 3 of us on the same (earliest flight).
I know in my first post I mentioned JFK-BNA, but only LGA-BNA became available.