American’s First Test Moving US Airways Onto New Reservation System Comes June 23

by Gary Leff

Aviation consultant Jeffrey Hartz pointed out an interesting anomaly in the American Airlines schedule for two weeks from today.

On June 23, American has scheduled two of the seven Philadelphia – Harrisburg, Pennsylvania US Airways Express flights as American Eagle flights.

They’ve also scheduled two of the eight Philadelphia – Richmond flights as American flights as well.

The same holds true for these two routes in reverse as well. And it’s one day only.

It appears to be the first time that American is testing running former US Airways flights as American flights, loaded into Sabre instead of the SHARES reservation system. These are pretty low stakes flights, so the idea presumably is to see any problems creep up here and at a low scale as part of early troubleshooting for the migration of US Airways over to American’s platform which will gradually occur between through mid-October.

At this point I believe these five roundtrips are the only ‘normally’ US Airways flights hosted as American flights in Sabre. So they’re flights to watch on the 23rd for their on-time performance – we can all publicly watch this first test!

I’ll be poking around with American in the coming days to see what I can learn about the next stages of their testing. It’s all pretty inside baseball stuff, but fascinating to watch unfold before us.

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. Got a SABRE update that says upcoming schedule change will convert first batch of records from SHARES to SABRE in the next few weeks….moving along…

  2. Can’t wait for this. I freaking hate SHARES with the passion of 1,000 UA fliers towards SMI/J.

  3. Buying one way AA flights on US Air website for $118 has been working well, last Saturday morning early picked up numerous DCA – MIA flights. Why choose economy when first is cheaper…

  4. This can’t happen fast enough. On Sunday, I had to check a bag because I was bringing a bunch of marketing schwag with me that was too late to ship to destination. I go up to the AA priority checkin line, the agent pulls up my itinerary, then says it will cost $25, I hate to DYKWIA but this time I had to and she looks at her screen and confirms that I didn’t have to pay as a Exec Plat. She typed a bunch of things and I didn’t have to pay but I could tell it was a mess. Luckily I cleared the AA AUS-ORD upgrade before boarding and I was already cleared for US ORD-PHL few days before. Last Friday, I got middle seat twice a rarity for Exec Plat partially due to IRROPS and partially due to them not having my AAdvantage # attached properly in the mixed itinerary. The challenge I have it is that my corporate booking system no longer shows mixed AA and US flights, it shows them as one or another and I only realize later that I am on a mixed itinerary.

    With some of these issues lately as a 1K, I almost considered shifting my flights to United till American gets it’s act together. But I need these segments for re-qual so have to live with it. I know first world problems but annoying nonetheless.

  5. This is independent of the drain-down migration plan (where as of a date in July, all flights 90-days or more out are moved from SHARES to SABRE, and all PNRs for flights 90-days or more out are also moved)? This is a test-run of a few flights on one day? But no PNRs are being moved?

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