The AA Award Map: Search Award Availability to Every City in Europe
Sometimes we have a situation where our destination is flexible, but our dates aren’t. When booking my parents’ trip to Europe this summer, they had a few destinations that interested them, but only had a specific week they could go. Fortunately, we were able to find them tickets to Rome with the help of the AA Award Map and didn’t have to spend hours checking several cities. We just typed in their dates, did the search and found the most convenient flights. We found tickets to Prague, Amsterdam, Milan, Madrid and many other cities within minutes. They chose Rome.
If you use the AA Award Map, you can quickly searching for availability on almost every flight to Europe within minutes. All you have to do is enter your dates and the number of miles you want to use. The AA Award Map will show its own award space as well as some partner space. You’ll be able to find space on the following airlines to Europe:
- American Airlines
- Finnair
- air berlin
- British Airways
US Airways award space has not yet been added to the award map though availability shows on the American Airlines website. Iberia Airlines is also not shows since aa.com does not show that space either.
Fuel Surcharges and a Few Issues
Also, keep in mind that British Airways will charge fuel surcharges so expect to pay about an additional $200 each way for economy flights from New York to London, for example. The other partners do not charge fuel surcharges.
In my parents’ case, it simply wasn’t possible to find three tickets on the same flights so I sent two people on American Airlines and one on British Airways. They arrived at the same time, but were charged a fuel surcharge for one ticket, for which they used their Barclaycard Arrival miles to cover the expense. The Barclaycard miles can be redeemed as a statement credit for any travel spending you put on the card. However, I connected their flight to a flight home from Saint Martin earlier in the spring and only used 20,000 American Airlines miles for each ticket to fly back from Saint Martin and all the way to Rome:
So even with one extra $200 fuel surcharge, they can’t complain!
Before I begin my explanation for how to use the award map as a tool, let me point out a very important bug in the website that may end up confusing people when searching for multiple tickets. Searching for more than one ticket with the AA award map does not work. Even if you have multiple people traveling, you’ll still want to search for a single award ticket. Once you know there is award availability, the next step is to check whether there are enough tickets. This is important to know so you’re not led astray into thinking there is zero availability for two tickets.
Searching for Award Availability
The AA Award Map will let you enter your home city, your dates, a region for where you want to go and how many miles you’re willing to spend. If you have a specific time you want to go, it will quickly find every European city use your miles for award tickets. I previously wrote about searching award space to every Caribbean island at once.
You will want to start by visiting the AA Award Map Website.
Here, you have a chance to enter your home city, region for destination, departure date, return date and total miles you’ll use. If you choose additional options, you can then select the maximum number of stops you want in your award search. When searching for tickets to Europe, you will want to enter the following numbers for Total Miles to Use to make sure you see SAAver availability only:
- One-way in Economy: 30,000
- Round-trip in Economy: 60,000.
- One-way in Business: 50,000.
- Round-trip in Business: 100,000.
These amounts will ensure you find the low level award space as opposed to AAnytime Award space, which costs far more miles.
For my example, I am going to search for availability to Europe at the end of May. Once I click Search, I can see all the available destinations those dates from New York:
To look at the actual available flights, you can select your city and click on Book Now.
Also, if you want to search for more than one ticket, you will have to go to the Award Search on the American Airlines website front page. But now you know there is at least one ticket so there may be many!
Searching for Non-Stop Flights
Non-stop segment flights to or from Europe are valuable as having these segments in your itinerary allow you to add free one-way flights within North America. If you have a non-stop segment to Europe from your home city, then your home city becomes your international gateway city. According to American Airlines award stopover rules, you can have a stopover in your international gateway city on any award flight between North American and another continent.
By connecting another trip within North America to your home city and continuing to Europe from there, you can get a free one-way flight. I previously gave a tutorial on this concept: How to Add Free One-Way Trips on American Airlines Awards.
To search for non-stop flights, you simply check the non-stop option in Additional Options. When booking my parents’ flight, I first found three tickets from NYC to London (because I wanted to get them free one-way trips from the Caribbean!) and then did a separate search from London for a list of cities in Europe they could travel to from there.
Once I knew there were two connecting flights with three tickets each:
- New York to London
- London to Rome,
I only needed to search for three tickets New York to Rome in order to book them and just find my flights.
My parents and sister are very excited about their trip to Rome! Has anyone else used the AA Award Map to make your searches faster?
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Does the award map allow you to exclude BA flights and their nasty fuel surcharges?
You can search for non-stop flights and anything that doesn’t go to London cannot be British Airways as that’s their hub. If you’re searching with stops, however, then it’s either “with partners” or “without partners”. You can just search AA, but then you’ll exclude Finnair and air berlin.
The tool definitely has its uses, but also its limitations as you note. I decided to make a quick getaway between Christmas and New Year’s, often a difficult time to find free seats, and didn’t really care where I was going as long it was warm there! I found reward seats to Cozumel via the award map, and then booked them with Avios, which was a great deal at 15,000 for the round-trip. I do wish AA would get the rest of its partners into its website search – that’s been progressing at a glacial pace for some years now.
I absolutely agree… searching availability and planning trips is definitely a multi-step process!
The AAward map shows availability but the AA booking program doesn’t know about that. It will show not available or available with many more miles needed.