American Airlines has added two more partners to their online award booking engine. Air Berlin and Finnair are the latest additions to the aa.com site. The site hasn’t updated to include the two carriers in the list of participating carriers but it is definitely including them in search results. A quick check of the site shows that the searches seem to be working well, including mixing them with other partners on award searches:
The fee details (top left) are generic which is unfortunate. Going through the process the above itinerary results in approximately $42.50 in taxes and fees. That appears to match the government-mandated fees on the itinerary so no extra charges for fuel or such.
I do have some concerns about just how complete the searches are. Searching against other public inventory data for the same flight details as noted above I am seeing inventory which suggests that non-stop options on Finnair should be available:
For some reason the AA site doesn’t show those. I haven’t yet called to see if they can see them in the call center or not but I’m quite intrigued that the website doesn’t show them. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. It does appear that Qantas sees them so I’m guessing it is a bug in the AA site:
Nice to see the new carriers added, but with the incomplete results it isn’t quite as useful as it probably should be.
And, in case anyone is wondering, the other search there is via my Wandering Aramean Travel Tools. It now supports Finnair Economy award seat searches and alerts directly, in addition to using the oneworld alert method.
Related Posts:
American Airlines adds Qantas as an online award redemption partner
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I encountered some issues with AY award availability several months back. As you noted, AY had some seats that were showing available on BA and Qantas’ sites – however AA could not see them. Ultimately, AA stepped up, contacted AY, and got everything squared away – but that may have been because I’m an AA EXP and believe me, it was not an easy process.
Interested to see if this goes anywhere.