British Airways' Website Isn't Showing American Award Availability
This is surprising: There is currently no American Airlines award space showing on British Airways' website. A TPG reader let us know that they weren't able to find any award space on the BA site, so we looked into it and found that — indeed — nothing is showing up.
Here's an example for a mid-October flight from New York to St. Louis on AA's site. As you can see for the entire month, there's pretty great award availability at the SAAver level — 12,500 AAdvantage miles plus taxes and fees:
However, when searching the BA site for AA award availability during one week of the month, there was absolutely no availability. Even on days when there was SAAver space, BA's site was showing nothing. On this route, BA usually charges 7,500 Avios for short-haul American flights in the US:
Here's another example: Minneapolis to Miami in March 2018. AA's award calendar shows plenty of SAAver space for the month:
However, the BA site is showing no available flights:
We've reached out to British Airways but have yet to hear anything back. At this time, the site is showing BA award availability, as well as that on some other partners. In addition, the AA site is continuing to show BA award space on its website.
This pattern holds true for both economy and premium cabin travel on all routes we've searched for. It's not clear what's causing this issue, but hopefully American and BA are working to get this resolved soon. I tried calling BA and the agent couldn't find any availability flying NYC to STL for an entire week in October or from NYC to Chicago for the same week, which is certainly strange. This comes at an unfortunate time, as there's a limited-time only 40% bonus for transferring Membership Rewards points to British Airways Avios.
We'll continue tracking this and update the post when we learn anything new.
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