American Discounting ‘Extra Availability’ Business Class Awards to Europe

by Gary Leff

American Airlines almost never releases business class saver awards, so if you want to fly American Airlines flights abroad in a premium cabin you’re almost always looking at an AAnytime award.

The airline has five levels of AAnytime award prices. Those are different price levels for booking any seat on the plane, including the last seat.

The saver award US-Europe price is 57,500 miles one way. The lowest AAnytime price is normally 110,000 miles. However via One Mile at a Time American is discounting summer business class AAnytime award travel to Europe.

  • Travel US to Europe August 1 – August 28
  • Travel Europe to US August 1 – September 18

In some sense on a promo basis 85,000 is the saver award price since there aren’t generally saver award seats released — unless you fly British Airways, and then you’re looking at hundreds or even a thousand dollars in cash co-pay (carrier-imposed surcharges) in addition to your miles.

Extra availability at the 85,000 mile level (on American flights, with no surcharges) is comparable to what you’d expect from competitor airlines. Delta generally charges 86,000 miles each way — or more — for their saver space. United charges 70,000 miles each way on partners (partner availability isn’t yet infested by the carrier’s dynamic award pricing).

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. So Gary would you book AF or AA personally I prefer AF even with the notorious service of the French it’s better than AA.

    just saying

  2. This is why AA deserves more love than it gets. Because neither UA nor DL ever makes saver TATL awards available at this price point, particularly in peak summer season. AA does this routinely but infrequently and unfortunately unpredictably.

    Very tempting to match these up with the TAP one-way fares Europe->USA.

  4. Stockholm syndrome at its best, you even allowed them to manipulate you and anchored yourself to the wrong number.

    The correct headline is “American promo reduces Business Class surcharge from 100% [or whatever the math says] to 48% [which is 85,000 / 57,500]” The correct number to use for all comparisons is the original, not-inflated, number.

    I figured you’d be smarter than this

  5. This has been going on for at least several weeks now. Booked JFK-MAD at the 85k Aanytime rate about 3 weeks ago. Was tempted to do that on the return but instead booked a nice TAP connection through LIS since we were coming from RAK.

  7. @Boraxo I don’t know about that. When AA screwed me by raising the anytime award I wanted from 110k to 180k miles, I picked up some tickets from Hawaii to Prague in business through UA for 75,000 one way on UA/SAS (for 5/31). And I also just got some from my small west coast town to Brussels for 128,000 RT from DL on Delta One 2nd half of August.

    In my experience all the airlines are hit and miss. Just when I think I’ll never get another good value award booking, something pops up somewhere. But you have to wait for a sale, keep checking often, and be flexible. On my last few trips I have booked flights with sub-optimal routing but found something better within 30 days of departure and switched.

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