How Many Days in Advance for AA and BA FF Awards
 

What's the latest information on how many days in advance American and British Airways release schedules to book FF tickets? And at what time of day on that date and in what time zone? It's been a few years since I was booking so far in advance but next years trip is a big one. And whats the best way to reserve a two week trip if the hold period isn't long enough anymore to reserve the departure and then wait two weeks to add the return? Oh, in case it is helpful to anyone else, I found a date counter website that let's you pick a date and subtract how many days in advance to get the new date. http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html

Lauri - we book the first avail date - 330 days out. What you do is book the first leg then call a week later for you return trip, AA will put it on hold for you for a week. We do it all the time. If you desire F/C seats one thing to consider when choosing your travel dates and using AA miles is to try to pick a week day to travel. When we travel on a Sat or Sun there rarely seem F/C seats avail. The AA phone reps are very helpful, patientand offer good suggestions.

SD

330 days (or in some cases, "11 months") is the earliest window, but be advised that on popular routes (i.e. where there's a high probability seats will be sold rather than redeemed) the release of seats into redemption inventory often doesn't occur at the front end of that window, but many are held back to see how sales are going before they're made available for redemptions.

As for the hold period, many airlines are shortening the hold period, some to zero days on partner flights. AA went from 2 weeks to 5 days a month or two ago; not sure what BA's hold options are.

The work-around is unpleasant and a tad risky but doable - book both the outbound and return portions, even if the return portion is not on a date you'd like, then change the return date once the window opens or availability occurs. Depending on the FF program you may need to pay a change fee, but at least you'll be able to get your dates. Remember that everyone else trying to redeem miles is in the same boat for tickets, so nobody will be able to jump the queue for the return.

"book both the outbound and return portions, even if the return portion is not on a date you'd like, then change the return date once the window opens or availability occurs."
I would do as Gardyloo suggests (in fact I do it all the time, as it is necessary). You book a "fictitious" return date and change it to the "real" one when that can be booked. Changing dates ONLY is without fees; if you change itinerary - there will be a fee.

PS
The above is true for AA; I am not familiar with BA fees.
BA (and QF) releases their schedules more than 330 days in advance but only for their FF members. If you are using AA miles to fly BA, you have to wait till 330 days before and cross all your fingers & toes to get BA's "left- overs"

You can check the availability and book awards online on www.aa.com. I have been looking at flights next April - early May for either Manchester or Frankfurt from Houston. Right now, there seems to be good availability at the 40k level.

You can ONLY check award availability on www.aa.com for flights on AA metal. You cannot check availability for any partner, AAdvantage or OneWorld. You need to call.


Never had problems finding F or J seats on BA flights. Needed to adjust QF dates couple of times, but nothing major.

Thanks for all your help. I devised my own "experiment". I used the www.timeanddate.com counter I found. June 10 next year is 330 days from today. Then I used www.aa.com to find availability for a trip that would depart on June 1 and returned on June 10. I received the following error message: "American Airlines can only display flights up to 329 days in advance. The date you have selected is either outside of this time frame or does not exist."

That means you should change the return date by 1 day (June 9) or try tomorrow with same dates.