American Airlines has now made awards on British Airways and Hawaiian Airlines bookable on AA.com. If you search for itineraries, results including these two airlines and Alaska Airlines will automatically show up among American Airlines’ own flights.
Note that there are sometimes glitches on award pricing on AA.com as I documented recently. On the following example the return 5K is priced correctly due to HNL being a stopover. On the way to JNB, however, I don’t think that there should be 5K charge for the feeder flight.
The real shocker is the fuel surcharges on flights involving BA. AA lumps these to taxes and surcharges and doesn’t itemize them. If you click few times around AA further explains about “carrier imposed surcharges”. On my example above the BA “imposed” fuel surcharges are about $1400.
It is easy to find the real taxes associated with the itinerary. As I was only interested about the BA fuel surcharges, I constructed an itinerary using ITA to find out the actual fuel surcharges on the four BA flights.
Constructing an itinerary like the one above was fairly easy. You just plug in the origin and destination and AA will display the flights that it can find. You can then choose the ones that suit you best, if there are multiple options.
This ability to book increasing number of partners on AA.com without having to talk to the reservations, is a welcomed feature. I hope that they would get other partners online as soon as possible as well.
