Award Booking Q's

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tscharke

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[FONT=&quot]My aim is to book an AA award flight in J for my wife and 5mth old son to join me on a late May business trip to Singapore. Not having booked an award flight through AA I have the following questions and would love for any tips or advice in making this happen...

How easy will it be to link my business booking to the AA award booking to ensure that we sit together and preferably with a bassinet?

Will I need to use points for my son's ticket? If so how much? as I cant seem to find any reference on AA.com

As business travel dates seem to jump around a bit will there be any issue in changing the dates of the AA award booking to match my business booking?

Is there anything that I may need to consider while traveling internationally with an infant? He is a frequent domestic traveler already and seems to love the air (i.e. he falls asleep soon after takeoff) however I assume that longer flights may prove to be an issue! anyone have any war stories that may help?

We intend to fly mid-week to avoid to normal crowed syd-sin runs and am looking at QF5 going over and QF32 coming back

Cheers in anticipation[/FONT]
 
Are you talking this may or 2008? For this may you'll be lucky to get any awards, let alone on the right dates, straight forward routing and with the flexibility you apparently need.
 
i gave the US desk a call yesterday and eventually after getting through all the speech recog hassle I was surprised to be told that there is still some availability for late May 07 early June - only for mid week flight tho (also includes some BA flights) However out of the other questions she could only tell me that no points are required for baby (bonus!)
 
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If you have gotten availability on dates that kinda work for you then I suggest you take them. As before, don't expect to be able to change the awards (even though AAdvantage is fairly flexible the issue is going to be availability).
 
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thanks kiwi flyer!

i had BA J award seats on hold and was just about to finalise before my business travel dates changed and I had to let them go......now I having real difficulty find availability! I think I was just very lucky with my first attempt in finding J award seat at such short notice!!!

another question - can you book BA WT+ award seats through the AA program? The AA desk chick could not help me with this question and actually told me to stop complicating things :D
AA only have three classes for awards - coach, business & first, therefore does this mean that they do not cater for 'premium' economy seat bookings such as BA WT+?
 
tscharke said:
i gave the US desk a call yesterday and eventually after getting through all the speech recog hassle I was surprised to be told that there is still some availability for late May 07 early June

I have find that by using an accent akin to Forrest Gump, I can get through the system no problems...But my wife looks at me very strangely when I do it... They have programmed the system to recognize every accent bar the Aussie one I think.

The other thing I have found for award flights to SIN & BKK is that BA are you best chance and they will open up about 7-8 days out from flight date. So if you can be a little flexible, then worth giving that a shot.
 
Rather than play with the voice recognition software, when it asks for the aadvantage number, just say "AGENT" and it will go straight to an agent or the other method I have found work is to state the letters using the NATO phonetic alphabet

Dave
 
:D @ IainF!!!

great tip Dave - the 'agent' word works a treat...

..it looks like my wife & son are going to beat me to flying F!!! as the only awards seats available on the same flight as me are in first class (Y is not an option here ;)) the extra 20k points for F is easy to swallow unlike the jealously of having them sitting down the front!

btw, I am really impressed with the ability to have award seats put on hold by AA without any cost - very handy when trying to coordinate things...
 
Dave Noble said:
Rather than play with the voice recognition software, when it asks for the aadvantage number, just say "AGENT" and it will go straight to an agent ...
Only problem with that is if you are an Exec Plat. I'll bet if you say "agent" you don't get routed to the Exec Plat desk!

Funnily enough I've been lucky with the voice recognition software. Only on one occasion did I have to repeat my AAdvantage number. I'm pretty sure I have a reasonably strong Aussie accent!
 
....for the life of me I cannot get the system to recognise '8' as it always thinks Im saying '5' ..even with a gump accent :D
 
Alan in CBR said:
Only problem with that is if you are an Exec Plat. I'll bet if you say "agent" you don't get routed to the Exec Plat desk!

No you don't. When wanting to get through to the desk for those that used to be Platinum, I then make the effort to use the NATO phonetics which gives me a 50-50 chance of it recognising what Im saying

Dave
 
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