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Once you have gotten some American Miles by applying for the 50,000 mile Citibank AA Platinum Personal MC or the 50,000 Mile Citibank AA Platinum Personal Visa or by Using Shopping Portals or by, gasp, actually flying, the next step is to book a trip using the miles you received!
American Airlines site has a very easy to use award booking engine, but it only shows a couple of the OneWorld Alliance Airlines (American, British Airways, Finnair, Qantas and Royal Jordanian) and a few that they have shared flights with (called codeshares) but aren’t in OneWorld (Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines). But when I am looking for a quick way to search for American flights, say to go from Miami to Cancun for the BPM Festival, it works perfectly. It is also a great way to check domestic award availability on American. Today I am going to show you how to book a flight with American Miles.
- Go to AA.com and put in your origin, destination, dates and select the checkbox for Redeem Miles and click Search.
- The next screen shows you the dates and miles prices that are available for a week at a time. You are looking for the green dates which will be the cheapest mile dates. For a month at a time select the Show Full Calendar option.
- Select the dates you want where there is green availability and then select continue.
- Then you can see which flights are available for what prices for both the departure and the return.
- Select the flights you want and hit continue then it will take you to a payment screen where you can see a summary of how many miles and what taxes you will have to pay.
That’s it! Also did you know that one of the benefits of your American Airlines Credit Cards is they give you discounts on award tickets to certain cities on a quarterly basis? This means you could get a round trip domestic coach ticket for 17,500 miles instead of 25,000! You do have to call in to book these special rates and pay a $35 phone booking fee which takes away some of the savings.
I hoped this article shows you how easy it is to book flights using American AAdvantage Miles. I will be doing a future article on a few better ways to book all OneWorld carriers so be on the lookout!
As always if you have any questions, leave a comment and I will answer it for you.
