Booking an American Airlines Award to Easter Island: Problems I Encountered

I previously wrote about how I used the American Airlines oneworld explorer award to book business class award tickets to Easter Island. As I explained in my post, flying to Easter Island with American Airlines miles requires connecting in Chile. Easter Island is in the South Pacific region while Chile is in South America Zone 2 region. Because American Airlines regular awards do not allow connections in a third region, I would have to book two separate awards and business class flights would end up costing me 200,000 American Airlines AAdvantage miles for round-trip. Instead, we went with the oneworld explorer award that charges based on distance and paid just 130,000 miles round-trip for each business class ticket. On top of that, we were able to schedule a multiple day stop in Buenos Aires on our trip to South America.

Even though I am very happy with the outcome, this was my first time booking oneworld explorer awards and it was a bit more complex than the usual award booking. I decided to share my experience so everyone booking these awards knows what to expect and can navigate these problems more easily in the future. Here’s what I ran into when booking the tickets:

Finding a Routing That Follows The Rules

Normally, when you book award flights with American Airlines, you just need to find availability in the right class on whatever partner. Non-oneworld member partners such as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines are even fair game for your standard vanilla American Airlines award. The American Airlines website does not show all partner award space (such as Cathay Pacific, LAN and Iberia, for example) so it’s best to search on British Airways for availability.

With the explorer award, there are a number of rules to follow and using the right partners and number of partners was the most difficult rule for me. You can only use oneworld partners and must use two oneworld partners other than American Airlines itself. That means Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines are off-limits and your schedule is more restricted because you must get that second oneworld partner in there. With US Airways and TAM joining oneworld, it’s a little easier now to book oneworld explorer awards to South America. In our case, LAN was pretty much the only non-American Airlines oneworld choice flying to South America. The one exception was a flight from Sao Paolo to Buenos Aires on Qatar Airways. We had to work very hard to make sure to get that Qatar Airways flight into every itinerary, but we did it in the end!

Arguing to Avoid Fuel Surcharges Multiple Times

Once it came time to book, our awards each priced at 130,000 miles. However, we kept being quoted around $300 in taxes and fuel surcharges. I previously wrote about my experience arguing to avoid the fuel surcharge. It turned out that American Airlines kept charging an extra fuel surcharge of $130-$15o to Sao Paolo on American Airlines, its own carrier flight. I have never seen this happen on regular awards, but unfortunately, it kept coming up on the oneworld explorer award.

Because of the next problem (awards not being ticketed), I had to call in several times to re-initiate ticketing of our itineraries and ended up having to argue the fuel surcharges every time. At some point, when booking Natalya’s ticket, an agent swore to me the pricing expert had personally gone through every single charge and there was no fuel surcharge, but I pressed on and eventually she came back with taxes of $150 lower.

If the $300 charge did not seem immediately suspicious to me, we probably would have paid about $500 more among the three of us than we should have. It’s a good thing I knew to question high charges!

The Award Not Being Ticketed and LAN Canceling My Flights

Another difference between a regular American Airlines award and a oneworld explorer award is the ticketing procedure. With regular awards, most agents can ticket them and they usually get ticketed within a few hours. For oneworld explorer awards, a oneworld explorer expert needs to review the itinerary for it to be ticketed and, from what I surmised, the experts have limited hours.

Svetlana’s ticket was ticketed within 24 hours so that was no problem. Mine and Natalya’s did not go so smoothly. After each of our awards was not ticketed after 48 hours, I had to call back. After repricing and arguing fuel surcharges again, they again put them in the ticketing queue. 24 hours later, Natalya’s was ticketed. Mine went even less smoothly.

Because of the delay ticketing my award, LAN canceled my held flights and there were no more award seats available on LAN for my dates. When I contacted American Airlines, they told me all they could do was send an email message to LAN asking to reinstate the seats and it was essentially LAN’s decision. Without LAN agreeing to return my seats, there was nothing American Airlines could do. Of course, they told me “Don’t worry. We’ll make it right. We’ll reinstate all the miles you used for the award at no extra charge.” After a week of calls on all the various issues, I was ready to throw something at the agent who said that to me! 48 hours later LAN had not looked at the email message and American Airlines could do nothing proactive outside of LAN’s business hours. It wasn’t looking good and we started preparing for alternate plans. Nevertheless, I was persistent and made sure to call in the morning during business hours for both American Airlines and LAN and insisted they verbally contact LAN and get a response on the matter… and, after all that, LAN returned my seats and my flights were finally ticketed!

Conclusion

When traveling with miles and booking many tickets, some are bound to go more smoothly than others. That’s just a fact of probability and randomness. American Airlines oneworld explorer awards can be very rewarding and a great use of miles, but they can cause more than a little bit of frustration. The best way to approach them is to anticipate the problems know how to react. Either way, I can finally look forward to our trip to Easter Island!