JJeffrey

Yes.

As a one time occurance, on an award ticket no less, it is laughable to suggest that anything "bad" will happen by skipping the last segment.

When you land in DFW just pull up your reservation at aa.com and cancel it, no one will ever look at it again.

kmandrew

Is there a way to pull up the old calendar view to see award availability one month at a time?

lrdpenn

Using the regular AA.com flight search, once you find a day with award availability on your route (or with availability +/- 1 week of your date, something like that), it brings up a view where you can select "calendar". You can use that to see award availability in a monthly calendar view. It's not the old AAward view that let you filter by award type, etc, but it's a monthly view.

If you dont initially enter a day with availability +/- 1 week, you can't open this view AFAIK. If someone has found a better way I would love to know too...

hurnik

Talk about variability.
So when I booked my AA flight it was 43k miles. Less than a minute later booked SO's ticket and it was 70.5. So I've been monitoring mostly daily to watch for price drops. It's been fluctuating mostly between 72.5 and 84.5 (every other day or thereabouts). Yesterday (once the website issues were resolved) I saw it for 69.5k. OK, go to reprice/rebook and had to do the two browser thing to "hold" while cancelling. When I went to buy the new ticket it repriced once more down to 43k. That's what the email says when I got it, so lucky me (I think). But wow, 43k to 84.5 (it's been as high as 94/95k as well). Still that's about 1/3 the price that UA wanted. (DL is almost as bad as UA now).

dogcanyon

They actually enforce this on award tickets?

JJeffrey

No.

dogcanyon

Thanks. That's what I thought.

MOC991

9K-35k for economy, 100K for domestic first RDU-LAX. That's absurd for first. Sad to see that my miles are so worthless for domestic first though. For comparison, RDU-LHR in proper business class is 136k-271k. Cheaper than that if you connect but I'd aim for the single 7 hour flight.

diaspora04

I was absolutely shocked to find four (4) U seats available for 57.5k miles each JFK-LHR-EDI in March. These mileage awards do exist.

Perhaps Scotland in March is not a popular itinerary.

Edited to add the important fact that these seats are on AA metal, so no YQ garbage.

VegasGambler

This isn't unusual. I got PHX-PHL for 12.5k when F was 100k. And still got upgraded 4 days out. I dunno why they were charging that much.

xtremegene

Since I didn't seen any wiki type things about this question (on this thread) nor could find it on searching the thread- is there any specific strategy/timing for finding cheapest AA award tickets? I assume not but just was curious because I was trying to search some AA metal award flights from TYO - IAH on about 2/24 - 2/26: A few weeks ago I thought I saw/was hopeful I saw a Premium Economy award ticket for only 50k miles, however I had to book it as regular economy for 33.5k miles (for 2/26, flights 176 HND-DFW and 2209 DFW-IAH) since I didn't have enough available miles (all 50k) at the time. Looking at PE award flights on 2/26 yesterday and today, and I think the cheapest are for 63k each now.

I spose I just have to hope/keep checking the award ticket booking site to see if it happens to go cheaper? And I also assume ExpertFlyer doesn't help anything regarding this type of pricing? (I have a Pro subscription there now but haven't tried their pricing stuff yet)

JJeffrey

Dynamic pricing is exactly that, dynamic. It can and will change from day to day, especially for an itinerary like that that is still months away. And you are correct that EF doesn't help for award pricing changes. Also just FYI, AA offers free 5 day holds on all awards, and you do not need all the miles in your account to put an itinerary on hold. So you could have put the Premium Economy award on hold when you saw it for 50k, then secure the requisite number of miles in 5 days, then go back and ticket it.

xtremegene

Good to know, thanks.
And yeah unfortunately I didn't want to spend extra money/purchases on miles within the 5day hold period, as I had planned flights/BAAH hotel stays 2-3 weeks after I saw the initial 50k PE pricing, and instead just bought the regular economy for placeholder flight.
Guess I'll play the daily refresh looking game to see if I get the nice 50k PE price or just bite bullets and spend more for current(/future) increased price on it, or be an uncomfortable pleb and stay in main cabin

MarkOK

Yep, often, domestic F is 100K+ roundtrip when I look for flights, which is downright insulting, really.

I did just book (for me, my spouse, and kid) a IAD-DFW-SWO return in domestic F for just 19.5K miles. I think the Y cabin was 14.5K for that leg. I'd much prefer DCA vs IAD, but every F award out of DCA was ~55K miles+ for that date.

VegasGambler

Is there any particular reason you want to fly AA metal instead of JL? If not, I would keep your economy ticket as a backup, and wait until 2 weeks before your trip. At that point JL will almost certainly have opened up TYO-DFW J (and possibly F) space for 60k (80k for F) miles and you can change to it.

Of course, periodically check to see if it's opened up, got don't get discouraged if you don't see anything until 2 weeks out. Do a search for the next 2 weeks to see what I'm talking about... it's wide open.

It's also possible that AA metal J space opens up for 60k miles but that's a lot more rare.