Finding American Airlines Award Flights

American Airlines has some incredible award flight options. And it’s important to know that sometimes you’ll get a much better deal if you book an AA flight via one of their alliance partners.

AMERICAN AIRLINES AWARD FLIGHTS

The biggest issue you’ll find with American Airline award flights is that no bank points transfer to American Airlines. The work around to this is booking your AA award flight with one of American Airline’s alliance partners. American Airlines is part of Oneworld alliance, which has 13 airline members.

Oneworld alliance members:
Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Qatar Airways, Royal Air Maroc, Royal Jordanian and SriLankan Airlines

*For best flexibility, I recommend searching one way flights when looking for award flights

Here some of my favorite options for booking American Airlines award flights

Book directly on American Airlines website

A few things to note:
1. You can search without logging in
2. AA has an a calendar view option you can see after you run initial search.
3. One of the BEST things about booking AA flights on AA is there is no cancelation/change fee – your miles are simply redeposited into your account with no fees

POINT OPTIONS FOR booking AA flights on AA

1. To book on AA, you’ll need to have AA points
2. The best way to earn AA points is via an AA credit card welcome offer
3. Add to this base of points by using the AA shopping portal (you can rack up a LOT of miles this way!)

Book AA award flights on British Airways

A few things to note:
1. You will need to sign in
2. Then hover over the word “Book” on the top tool bar (on desktop) and select “Book a flight with Avios”
3. Search for the same flight you found on AA
4. BA has super reasonable cancelation policy – usually they just take the taxes/fees paid or up to $55.

Here you can see this EXACT same AA flight is bookable via British Airways for slightly less points & the same taxes. Also, don’t let the word “Avios” throw you off – that’s just what BA calls their points.

POINT OPTIONS FOR booking AA flights on British Airways

1. You can transfer points from Chase, American Express, Capital One to British Airways.
2. Over the last few years, we’ve seen 30% transfer bonuses to British Airways from the banks. If you can time your transfer/booking with this, you can save a ton of points. You can always check current transfer bonuses here.

Book AA award flight with Qatar

A few things to note:
1. You must sign in to search award flights – you won’t even see the “book award flight” option until after you sign in
2. Sometimes you’ll find the exact same pricing option on Qatar that you saw on British Airways, but sometimes you will see cheaper
3. Qatar has super reasonable cancelation policy – at least 24 hours before, $25. If 3 hours to up to 24 hours $100. If 3 hours of less you forfeit all miles.

POINT OPTIONS FOR booking AA flights on Qatar

1. Citi and American Express points can be transferred to Qatar
2. There is a work around to give you more options – transfer your points TO British Airways and then from British Airways you can transfer them to Qatar (and if you remember from the previous section, Chase, American Express, Capital One all transfer to British Airways).

How to link your British Airways & Qatar accounts

Linking your British Airways & Qatar accounts means you can transfer Avios instantly between the 2 airlines.

1. You’ll need to have an account with British Airways & Qatar. It is free to create these. Always make sure your name matches across all of your accounts. Be careful when entering birthday on Qatar, it’s a day/month/year sequence.
2. While logged in to Qatar, go to this page to link your accounts

3. You’ll click the “Link your accounts” and simply follow prompts – super easy
4. Once accounts are linked, you can go back to that SAME page and click “Combine your Avios

This is instant. And you can easily move them between your British Airways and Qatar accounts.

Book AA award flight with Etihad

A few things to note:
1. You don’t need to sign in to search award options
2. Etihad award flight cancelation policy is one of the worst I’ve seen. It ranges from 100% of the fare if canceled in 24 hours to 25% of the fare if cancelled MORE than 21 days ahead of the flight.
3. I’m including this option because sometimes there are BIG transfer bonuses (at the time of writing this, there’s a 40% transfer bonus from Citi to Etihad)

POINT OPTIONS FOR booking AA flights on etihad

1. You can transfer points from American Express, Capital One & Citi

Book AA award flight with Qantas

A few things to note:
1. You will need to login to do an award search
2. I found that although Qantas wasn’t necessarily cheaper than booking with other partners (like Qatar) they had way more AA award flight availability than the other partner airlines I searched
3. Qantas cancelation policy starts at a penalty of 5K points… which can be significant when you are booking a flight that’s just 12K miles. So be aware of this before you book and weigh your likelihood of needing to cancel/change.

However, where Qantas award program really shines is short distance AA flights. For flights 12,000 miles or less they charge 12K miles. For flights 600 – up to 12,000 miles they charge 8,000 miles.

POINT OPTIONS FOR booking AA flights on qantas

1. You can transfer points from American Express, Capital One & Citi

MY PERSONAL STRATEGY AS INFREQUENT AA FLYER

My husband and I both recently signed up for the AAdvantage® Aviator® Red World Elite Mastercard®. While we don’t plan to put our every day spend on this card, signing up for this card is often a smart move to get the welcome offer.

But in general, we focus on earning transferable/flexible points which we can use to book AA flights via their alliance partners. My go 2 for earning points with my everyday spend are Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card and Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card.
The airline alliances mean you have many options! Highly recommend focusing on earning transferable/flexible points.

TAKE AWAY

There are lots of ways you can book AA award flights. I also want to mention that these are the same options you’d look at for booking a Japan Airlines flight (also in the Oneworld alliance). It’s important to understand how helpful alliances can be with award bookings. But it’s also important to understand cancelation policies. Like with Etihad – I would almost never choose this option because of the poor cancelation policy. And I’d only choose Qantas if I was VERY sure of my travel.

In general, something you want to think about is… if I did have to cancel my flight and get my points refunded… “where am I okay having miles stuck because I know I’ll have other good uses for them?” For me… knowing how flexible British Airways/Qatar Avios are is a big win. I also love that Qantas has so man great AA award flight options so using those miles probably wouldn’t be an issue.

*One thing to note, I’ve only listed main bank transfer partners in this article and transfers that are 1:1.