Successes Asking American Airlines to Release Domestic Award Seats Connecting to International Flights

Ridiculously Extraordinary writes about being inspired by my post about little white lies I tell airline agents when booking awards to get American Airlines to release a domestic flight in advance of an international award segment.

Now, the author originally wanted something that isn’t possible:

So while I was booking my flight to India a couple of months ago I settled on flying American Airlines / British Airways. I wanted to fly Cathay Pacific, but didn’t know how to get the person I was speaking to at AAdvantage to give me the CP ticket. She told me only the AA/BA flights were available. I knew that wasn’t true, but I didn’t know enough to get around it.

On an American Airlines partner award you need to route from the US to India via the Atlantic. It’s only on a oneworld award (which also requires two partners that aren’t American) that you can pick your own routing. So unless you book a oneworld award, I don’t believe Cathay Pacific is an option from the US to India.

But success came in cutting down a Chicago layover, asking American to open up seats on a flight that wasn’t showing standard awards as available.

And this reminds me of one of the nice things about American. I’m a lifetime AAdvantage Gold, but certainly not an Executive Platinum (sitting around 1.8 million miles earned lifetime, closing in on Platinum). So I don’t have real juice with the airline.

But a year or so back I booked an award where I wanted to fly DCA-JFK in order to connect to an international premium cabin segment departing JFK. The DCA-JFK flight was unavailable. The rep put me on hold for a little bit, and Inventory Management released the seats on the short domestic hop for me so I wouldn’t have to fly up to New York the night before.

And I was much appreciative.