Booking
There are many posts on actually booking on AA.com. I will summarise them here soon, but for now, please see this thread:
http://www.australianfrequentflyer....ines-advantage/best-way-book-aa-ex-29112.html
I have not referred to the Oz booking portal here as it is not as amenable to the type of routings were are after here.
With the replication of the fare on AA it getting really close to finalising the booking.
It used to be quite an issue to get past this point to complete the booking (see references to El Segundo elsewhere on the forum), but these days AA.com is a lot easier to book with.
When entering your flights search criteria in the multi-segment booking page, down the bottom is "
6. Country of Residence:" option.
"
Australia" is not available here - I choose the very last option "
All Others" before clicking GO.
The next screen is the "Choose Flights" - find the option for the routing previously ascertained as being available and click the [SELECT] for that one.
The next screen may asked youto log in to your AAdvantage account, I suggest you do this. It's free to join if you don't have one and provides means to easily look up you bookings and otherwise expedite processes with this and other bookings going forward. You can select, "Continue Without Logging In" if you prefer.
The next screen in the process is "Customer Details"; it will generally be auto populated with information from your AAdvantage account or previous bookings.
Since most would want to enter their Qantas Frequent Flyer number here, the first thing to do is select "Qantas Airways" from the drop box. (If you try changing some of the other data, but the same pop up referred to in the next paragraph will appear in any case).
Changing from "AAdvantage" will invoke a pop-upr, querying your choice: "Are you sure you want to change this Information?". Click "Yes, Remove it" and the pre-filled fields will be cleared. Now enter the passenger's details carefully. (You will also need to reselect "Qantas Airways" as that jumps back to "AAdvantage" for some reason.)
Continuing entering your details carefully; I enter the one 'phone number selecting +61 being my country prefix. Click [CONTINUE]
Review your routing on the next screen (you may need to click "Show Trip Details"). When Satisfied, click the "Select Seats" checkbox and select [CONTINUE]
The select seat window will appear - select the seats you prefer for each flight (more on that later) and finish by clicking [SUBMIT].
The next page shows a list of your flights following by a list of payment options. I select Credit Card here. You can also "hold" the booking for for later payment.
After selecting Credit Card further details are requested -I include a copy of
penegals's post here. (Although I always see Australia listed these days, so no need for El Segundo in my case.)
If Australia appears on the country list you no longer need to use the 'El Segundo' method.
I have successfully made bookings on AA.com using an address like this:
View attachment 9144
If you read the form carefully it says that the least two fields are only required for "U.S. and Canada", and "U.S., Canada, Mexico or UK" respectively.
In my experience if you populate the ZIP/Postal Code box your form will fail their validation checks as the website checks this field regardless of which country is selected, therefore I have started putting the state and postcode it in the city box in order to enter a 'correct' & 'complete' address.