Back in December when American rolled out their “Your Choice Essential” and “Your Choice Essential Plus” bundled fare options they updated the website booking process and managed to downgrade the user experience by removing the sorting feature.

I guess the people that designed the website never actually used AA.com to book tickets, because it seemed like a rather huge and obvious oversight. When the update went live and the sorting feature was missing, American received howls of protest feedback from many of their best customers.

We complained. They listened. Sorting is back!

Sort by Stops/Travel Time

Your sort options are the same, but they work a litte differently. From a pull down menu you can sort by Number of Stops or Total Travel Time.

Sort by Price

The Sort by Price has been improved.

Click on the column “UP” or “DOWN” arrows to sort

Each column in the fare matrix can now be sorted independently. This wasn’t possible on the old site. So now it’s much easier to find the lowest priced instant upgrade fare.

Another Improvement.

Another feature that went missing with the upgrade was being able to view the results on a single page. Now you can “View all Results” on a single page.

If you’ve been using Kayak, ITA, or some other site to research you fares, you can come back to AA.com now.

It was a mistake to remove the sorting function to begin with, but I have to give American credit for responding to customers.

Win 2,500 AAdvantage Miles

Don’t forget the Frugal Travel Guy’s Monday Deal of the Day is sponsored by AAdvantage, so go here and share your favorite AAdvantage or American Airlines related tip for a chance to win 2,500 AAdvantage Miles!

So I go to AA.com to book two trips and discovered a big upgrade change.  This is what it looked like:

I could never get the complete page to load, but the booking matrix has been changed to display roundtrip prices rather than splitting them up as outbound/return fares.

It also displays new “Your Choice Essential” and “Your Choice Essential Plus” bundled packages that include extra options like checked bags and priority boarding.  Here’s a look at theses new “Choices”:

The site wasn’t really working, so I can’t say that I don’t like it, but I will say this: I can’t figure out how to sort results by departure time, fare, or any other criteria.

Maybe I’m overlooking it, but if sorting is gone, I’m not going to be happy.

Again, the site wasn’t working properly so I’m withholding judgement, but I did notice a few other important features/functions that (for now) seem to be missing. If it turns out that they’re gone for good, then this is definitely not a “upgrade”.

I was able to book one ticket and other than the pricing matrix the rest of the process seemed unchanged.  Thankfully, the 24 hour hold is still there (always a worry to me anytime they make a change, not because of any rumors, but just because I’m paranoid).

Here’s a link to a info page, complete with a video, describing how it’s supposed to work. Have you had a chance to try it yet? Your thoughts?

American rolled out a few small improvements to their website late last week. Here are the highlights.

New Seat Maps

Here’s a look at the new seat maps. This is from the new Boeing 777-300ER with a three class configuration and Main Cabin Extra seating.

First Class

Business Class

Main Cabin

Detail of seat map Legend

Fare Deals

Another new improvement is that fare deals are now displayed as round-trip prices. Not a big deal, but it’s always seemed somewhat less than candid that while prices were listed as one way fares, most deals required a round-trip purchase. I have always thought that the asterisk and the “round-trip purchased required” was disingenuous.

One small technology advance. One giant leap forward with transparency in pricing!

Login

You can now access your account using your AAdvantage account number or your email address.

One issue

This may not be an issue any longer, but Friday morning I noticed that my reservations disappeared. They were no longer listed under the “My Reservations” tab.

I was able to bring them back by accessing “My Reservations” under the top navigation menu.

And then using the record locator, I was able to retrieve them. Now my reservations are displayed when I access my account.

Did I miss anything?  Did you notice any other changes?

(Shameless plug – don’t forget to vote in American’s AAdvantage Tips Facebook contest for a chance to win 5,000 AAdvantage Miles.  You can also vote for your favorite Expert Tip (I’m participating) and help me win some miles to give away on the blog and to donate to AA’s Miles for Kids.

Speaking of AAdvantage Tips: Don’t forget that Monday is AAdvantage Day at the Frugal Travel Guy. Go share your favorite AAdvantage advice in the comments section for a chance to win 2,500 AAdvantage Miles!)

Back in November of last year, American improved the award booking process by enabling you to use aa.com to book AAdvantage award travel on partner carrier Alaska Airlines.

They’ve said several times since, that it’s their goal to make it possible for AAdvantage members to book more partner awards online.  And back in January at the oneworld MegaDo the the American and AAdvantage teams gave an outline of some of the improvements they were working on, which included:

• By end of 1Q, customers will be able to book routes continuing BA flights using AAdvantage award miles on AA.com.

• Alaska already participating.
Other carriers on deck:
Qantas
Royal Jordanian
Finnair

Over the weekend, the web ninjas at AA.com deployed an update to the site and now you can search for AAdvantage Awards space on British Airway and hawaiian airlines!

Here’s a look of the list of participating Award Carriers:

Now when you search for an award, you’ll see the option to search AA and Partners:

Here’s a close up:

Here’s a look at the search results for a round-trip, DFW to London award, it includes flights on American Airlines (AA) and British Airways (BA):

As an aside, there’s lot of availability on British Airways, but then that might be a result of the hefty fees that attach to award tickets.

Here’s a look at the fees for round-trip flights on British Airways, between Dallas/Ft. Worth (DFW) and London (LHR), in economy:

Now here’s a look the fees for a similar, round-trip economy class award ticket between DFW and LHR on American Airlines:

I might consider paying the fee for a premium class ticket on their 747 from DFW to London, but not on any other aircraft and certainly not in coach. When you have a choice between American or British Airways, you’ll get much more value from your miles if you choose to redeem them on AA flights instead of BA.

Despite my grumbling about BA’s fees, it’s nice to be able to search their inventory for award space. My brother and I have been kicking around the idea of a trip to Istanbul and have had to use KVS Tools and the Qantas website to search for availability.

This makes it as easy as looking up a flight to Indianapolis.

Searching for flights to on Hawaiian Airlines is pretty easy too, here’s a search between Dallas and Honolulu:

And here’s a look at the fees:

$10 to Hawaii – what a bargain!

This is a great improvement. AAdvantage already offers more ways to use your miles and they continue to make it easier. A big high five to Team AAdvantage and the IT team at AA.com!

Here’s a little interesting speculation: last night AA.com was displaying one-way “Economy MileSAAver Special” awards for 8,500 AAdvantage Miles. That’s more than 40% off the usual 15,000 mile Economy MileSAAver Off Peak award.

I found out when travel and music blogger (and fellow AAdvantage fAAn), HouseofV sent me a tweet.  I was able to find Economy MileSAAver Special awards from DFW to Lima, but when I tried to make a reservation  it booked at 15,000 miles, so my guess is that it was probably a test or a glitch of some kind.

Not sure if it means anything….but it’s fun to speculAAte.

Go here to read HouseofV’s post, he’s even got screenshots.

Photo: Salhia – Digbeth – There’s a Rumour …
Credit: Elliott Brown on Flickr

I have a confession, it may be a little obsessive, but every morning I check my AAdvantage account balance and take a look at my AA reservations.

This usually happens on my iPhone while I’m standing in line at Starbuck’s, and this morning when I went to the AA.com mobile site while waiting on my Americano, I noticed that it had been completely redesigned.

Here’s a look.

The new home page.  Cleaner and with tabs to help you navigate with fewer clicks.

The new reservation page is much improved. On the old site the “Select” and “Cancel” links were small and too close together, making it easy to accidentally select the wrong action.   The new site has buttons which make it much easier to select an option without making a mistake. 

The new seat map.  The old site didn’t display every row in one page, you had to navigate through two or three pages to see all the seats.  This new site displays the whole seating map on a single page.

I like the new website.  Take a look for yourself at mobile.aa.com and share you thoughts in the comments section.  

Perhaps this is a little inside baseball, but the Admirals Club section at AA.com has been redesigned. It’s much better looking and the content has been reorganized so that now it’s easier to find information (especially if you’re trying to find locations).

Trying to understand lounge access policies is probably one of the main reasons visitors to come to the site. Now they’ll be able to use the new Admirals Club access tool to help them determine whether, where, when they’ll have access to a club.

Here’s a look at the new homepage:

And a look a the lounge access page:

Back in January I told you about a discount code to save as much as $100 on a new membership:

Purchase a new annual Admirals Club membership online today and save $100 on the annual membership fee. Use promotion code ACQ112 online and then click the RECALCULATE button to receive the discount.

This offer was set to expire on February 29, but yesterday I heard from a reader (thanks Evan!) that the code is still working. I’m already a member so I wasn’t able to try it myself, so I sent a note to a friend and asked him to give it a try. It worked for him too.

Not sure when this discount will expire, but if you’ve been considering a membership, now is probably a good time to buy.

A quick note: You many have noticed, but there were a few technical difficulties with Boarding Area the last couple of days.  Thanks to the effort of the BA IT team, everything is working again.

I was planning to give away an American Airlines USB card and a free Gogo Wifi code each day this last week, and we had two winners before the website troubles started, so I still have three more cards to give away.   Just to be certain that the Boarding Area server is going to behave,  I’m waiting until Monday to restart the reader giveaway.

Speaking of restarting a reader contest, Lufthansa Flyer is relaunching his ‘My Most Embarrassing Moment As A Tourist’ Contest.   Share your most embarrassing story from the road and you might win an iTunes gift card. If you’re story is too embarrassing to share, at least read some of the stories in the comments section.   There’s some pretty funny stuff there.

Have a great weekend!

Update:  Brett Snyder had one of his “Across the Aisle” interviews with AAdvantage President, Maya Leibman over on his Cranky Flier blog. You can read it here.

Last Friday I wrote about AAdvantage President Maya Leibman and her team asking members of both the FlyerTalk and milepoint forums for ideas about how to improve the AAdvantage section of AA.com.

The most frequent request was for the ability to book oneworld and partner awards online.  Which wasn’t surprising for a couple of reasons, in that there isn’t any way on AA.com to:

• Find AA partner and oneworld award inventory

• Book an award without calling reservations and incurring a $25 service charge

It’s a frustrating limitation that’s long been a discussion in the forums.

The subject even came up during the milepoint chat with Maya back in May:

7:45 Comment From Cameron:
Is there any plans to allow AAdvantage members to see/book partner awards online?

7:45 Maya:
I’m really glad we got this question. This is a priority for us and one that we’re working on now. I don’t want to get into “how the sausage is made,” but it is my hope to have this available by the end of the year.

That was the first indication that a fix was in the future.

Things started to look more imminent a couple of weeks ago when JonNYC posted this in the Traveling Better forums:

Booking of partners awards coming to AA.com– in bits (Alaska Airlines first)

On or about NOV10, we’ll be able to book awards on AA.com that incorporate AS.

More exciting; it’s being “advertised” (internally) as:

Quote:
…the start of incorporating all 27 airline partners on to AA.com

Well it looks likes the first big step has happened: over the weekend American updated their website and it’s now possible to book Alaska Airlines awards online.   This is from the Alaska Airlines partner page at AA.com:

Book award travel on Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air carriers on AA.com or contact Reservations at 1-800-882-8880 (or your local American Airlines office).

I played around a little with this new AA.com feature, and availability of awards from DFW to HNL on Alaska Airlines looked good.  I was even able to find some at the lowest, MileSAAver, redemption level.  Here’s a look at some screenshots:

Booking AAdvantage Award at AA.com for travel on Alaska Airlines

Detail of booking AAdvantage Award at AA.com for travel on Alaska Airlines

Hopefully they’ll expand this feature soon and you’ll be able to book awards with more partners.

So clearly a pattern has been established. Post your suggestions in one of the forums on Friday, and Maya and the AAdvantage team will work over the weekend and have it ready by Monday.

Nice!

This is off topic, but since it’s Monday, I thought you might be interested in a little distraction from your inbox.

Video artist Michael Konig released this HD video over the weekend: it’s series of time lapse sequences of photos taken from the International Space Station.

Sigh….hopefully there will come a day when we can use our AAdvantage Miles to travel to space…..

Unless scientists capture the Loch Ness Monster or discover an asteroid headed towards earth, the big story this week is going to be the Apple’s Tuesday press conference to unveil the iPhone 5.  Way over on the other end of the news coverage spectrum is a small upgrade of the American Airlines website that happened over the weekend.

American has been rolling out updates of AA.com all year.  Some of them have been cosmetic improvements to the look and design of the website, while others have been backend upgrades to allow them to add new service products such as Preferred Seats and paid PriorityAAccess.  I guess the AA.com web team must have spent part of Friday night working, because Saturday when I went to the site to purchase a ticket for a reservation I had made on Friday, I noticed the reservation page had been redesigned.

The most prominent new feature of the reservation page is the larger typeface.

Here’s a look at the the details section of the reservation page:

Here’s a screen capture of the notification profile section:

Here’s a screen capture of the upgrade request section:

The thing that you don’t notice immediately though, is the flexibility of the new design.  I took a look at the source code behind the new page and the AA.com web team designed it so that it looks good on multiple screen sizes and devices. It scales nicely on the desktop as well as iPads and tablets sized screens.  Here’s how it looks on the iPad.

It’s funny how deeply attached people can be to a design once they become familiar with it, and I’m no different.   At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the larger text.   But after viewing the change a few times, I came to realize that it’s much easier for my aging eyes me to see.   Now I don’t need my glasses to read it anymore; it’s like 1999 all over again!

Speaking of 1999, just to show you how far the site has come, here’s a look at the home page via the Wayback Machine:

So what do you think? Do you like the new look?

Over the weekend American upgraded their website and introduced a new online seat selection process, new seat maps, and the new marketing term “Preferred Plus”.

For a while now, these were the step you followed when making an online reservation at AA.com: choose your flight, provide passenger information, then hold or purchase your reservation.   To that process, they’ve added a new step that allows you to select your seat:

There are two versions of the new seat map, one visibile to  AAdvantage members with elite status, the other visible to everyone else.  Just like most other airlines, American has long reserved certain seats for their most frequent flyers, and passengers without elite status haven’t been able to choose those seats.  Last year, American started making these “Express Seats” available to the general public for a price.   Now these premium seats are being referred to as “Preferred Plus” on seat maps displayed to AAdvantage Gold, Platinum, and Executive Platinum members:  Here’s a look:

Here’s how the same seat map appears to those without status, note the term “Preferred Plus” isn’t displayed:

At the moment, there isn’t the option to purchase these seats during the reservation process, but it’s a safe bet to speculate that soon it will be possible.   American hasn’t made any official announcements, but the usually accurate source that moderates that American Airlines discussion in the Traveling Better forum has posted details that support the idea.  And  as you might expect, the discussion over at milepoint and Flyertalk has already begun.