You might remember reading here a few weeks ago about how I am trying to help some friends of mine book 3 tickets to Australia for an epic family trip
(SEE ALSO: Will we get this family of 3 to Australia?)
While they’re okay flying in economy, they are trying to go over the Christmas / New Year’s break, which is one of the most popular times to fly for what seems like LITERALLY EVERY PERSON ON THE ENTIRE WORLD!!!
Getting the miles
Over the past few months, they’ve gotten a couple of credit cards and met the minimum spending to rack up a bunch of good signup bonuses. Between the Chase Sapphire Preferred, Chase Ink, and a couple of Citi American AAdvantage cards, they have 102,000 American miles in one account, 55,000 in another, and 130,000 Ultimate Rewards.
Our plan was to use the American miles to fly from the US to Australia, and then transfer the Chase Ultimate Rewards to United to book the return flight back to the US
Finally, the miles all posted and we were ready to book the trip. This was a bit later than we’d have liked, since space opens up 330 days out and tends to go fast. Still, you can’t book the trip without the miles, so we had to wait…
(Trying to) book the trip!
My friends came over last night and we were ready to book the trip. While I had been finding availability on the LAX-AKL flight, we were able to find 3 seats from Los Angeles on a direct flight to Sydney on December 21st. While that was a bit later than they would have preferred to leave, that was our best choice, so we called to book the flight
We could (and probably should) have put the 3 LAX-SYD seats on hold online, but we were hoping to call in to get a phone agent to “complete the itinerary” by opening up the domestic space from CVG-LAX. The agent we spoke to either wouldn’t or couldn’t do that, and wanted to charge the $40 phone fee to do the hold.
(RELATED: American Airlines hold on reservation: putting an award on hold for 5 days (for free!))
What complicated things was that we only had enough miles to book 2 of the tickets in one account, though I guess looking back we could have put the hold on 3 tickets and then paid for it with the miles from the 3rd account when we called to finalize the booking. We put 2 of the seats on hold from LAX-SYD.
Presto change-o, I’ll make your award space… DISAPPEAR!
Then it was time to put the 3rd seat on hold. We had a bit of a problem with figuring out the password for my friend’s account but eventually got that figured out. But when he logged in, here’s what we saw for LAX-SYD
OH. NO!
The award space for 1 person on the 21st has…DISAPPEARED!
We tried calling in but they weren’t able to do anything for us. So either something about us booking 2 of the tickets caused the 3rd one to disappear, or someone booked it right out from under us! If it was someone reading this note, I hope you’re happy!!! 🙂
So at this point the plan is to at least put the ticket on the 23rd on hold and hope for something better to open up. Or does anyone out there have any suggestions to help this family?
Clearly, my career as an award booker has started with an ignominious whimper….
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I see space for 3 in Y from LAX to either Melbourne or Brisbane on 12/22 on Qantas.
Cathy – where are you seeing that? I’m not seeing on AA which I thought showed Qantas availability. I have seen some premium economy seats on BA – is that what you’re seeing?
Use Qantas’ search engine (AA’s search engine doesn’t seem to show all available award seats on Qantas) and as previous comment indicates, there are 3 seats in Y on both the LAX-BNE and LAX-MEL flights on 12/22 and there is plenty of availability on connecting flights to Sydney if that’s the ultimate destination.
If the AA agent insists on the surcharge, you can let them know the awards don’t show up on AA.com’s site, so can’t be booked online. Otherwise, HUCA until you get an agent that agrees to waive it.
Thanks guys! I will let my friends know! Clearly I am not cut out to be an award booker 🙂
The AA agent couldn’t see that Qantas space – looks like it might be phantom space which explains why it’s not showing on AA, BA or Alaska
With the award devaluation looming any Saaver space on AA will go fast so if you find availability go ahead and put it on hold and ten call in to see if you can have them add on or open the other space you need. The UA booking should be less stressful.
AA agents can fix anything. Hold first, ask questions later, always! In this case it looks like you ran into Qantas real-time inventory management which pulled the third seat when the first two were booked.
If you had gone ahead and put all three of them on hold in one reservation, you could have called and had them split the reservation and made changes as needed. If it were my reservation and it’s still held, I would cancel it and then try to do that. YMMV.