Recently I ticketed award travel on a oneworld airline using American AAdvantage miles. Since there was a schedule change (by a few minutes) between when I put the reservation on hold and when I was ready to ticket, I had to call an agent rather than issuing the award online.

Three days passed and I never got a ticketing email. The awards still showed as being ‘On Request’. So I rang up American to fix the problem. The agent, naturally, first told me there was no problem but that’s obviously wrong.

• Partner award travel doesn’t get ticketed right away, but it usually happens in a few hours or overnight.

• It’s not for travel right away, and they’ll prioritize immediate travel. There may well be a backup in the ticketing queue. But it usually does not take three days.

• Every time I’ve ever had an award not ticketed after three days, it’s because something is wrong (easily fixable).

There were schedule changes, and American wouldn’t ticket until the schedule changes were accepted. These were just a change to flight times of 10-20 minutes, and they’d taken place before I had requested ticketing. The agent I gave my credit card for taxes to didn’t clean up the reservations, so they simply sat unticketed.

When award tickets fall out of the queue, do not expect American Airlines to do anything about it proactively. Don’t even expect them to tell you. Watch for the ticketing email, or check your account to see that the status of the reservation has changed to ticketed in order to ensure your reservation is all set.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a minor complaint in the scheme of things for me. I know what I’m doing. A simple phone call got the reservations cleaned up and ready for ticketing. But most people think that when you ticket an award, you have an award ticket. But that isn’t quite the case. And unticketed award reservations do sometimes get cancelled by the operating carrier!