I did a search for American Airline award flight today for the first time in about 3 weeks.

I love the new reservation system that American Airlines has put online. If no flights are available at the redemption level you request, it brings up how many miles are required to travel on each day over a 4 week period. You can even toggle the calendar to show available days for each class.

And when you are selecting the flight on a given day, in addition to showing the flights available for redemption, it shows what other flights are available for more miles.

Keith

Is it possible to do mileage upgrades with it? My dial-up at home is so slow so I'm asking rather than trying to navigate aa.com.

I agree that the new system appears to be very user friendly. However, I found that in trying to book a flight on almost any given day using the minimum amount of miles (25,000), the majority of the flights available are late afternoon or evening flights. Some have very long layovers with multiple connections. With this new system, in order to get a decent flight schedule, it will require more miles per ticket (45,000). I feel their aim is to discourage the use of 25,000 MileSaver Awards.

I booked a few tickets yesterday on the new AA.com reward redemption feature. It was simple and very user friendly, much easier than the old reward booking function.

That sounds really cool. Unfortunately I won't be able to use it for a long time, as I've just spent all of my miles on a trip to Israel and I'm broke!! ("broke" in terms of air miles, that is)

But it was a great trip and those miles were well spent!!

The whole airmiles system is a mystery to me.I've got LOTS of miles and not because I don't travel. It seems that every time I try to book business class(on AA or United) no seats are available. Of course if I want to pay double miles they just MIGHT find me a seat. What gives? Is there something I should know?

If you're wanting upgrades, Bobby what I do is call the AAdvantage desk in the evening. It costs a little to book this but they do all the searching for you. It helps that you can be flexible on your dates. A lot depends on where you're flying from also. They sometimes release mileage upgrades closer to your arrival but I can't gamble with my vacation time.

I LOVE the new award flight search engine!! I used it for two 35,000-mile R/T tickets LAX-HNL. Couldn't have been easier to use, and considering the travel was over Labor Day weekend, I think I had a nice choice of flights and seats!

While the new award search engine is a great improvement over the old one, let's not forget one very important fact.

It will ONLY show you AA availibility. AA has many partners and this new engine will still not show you availibilty with them.

To <b>really</b> know all the possibilities we still have to call AA.

Hopefully the AA All-Partner awards will soon be incorporated into the new search engine.

I know that the AA OneWorld awards(my favorite) will probably not be, at least not in my lifetime.



Reporting from Cracow, Poland.

So very true, AAFF. I often use my FF miles to book partner awards and I hate that can only search or book partner awards over the phone. And to boot, they charge you a fee for booking over the phone. This bothers me because we don't have the option NOT to book over the phone.