American Airlines Award Delays Could Ruin Your Trip—Here’s the Simple Fix You Need

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!

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. Better to go to the airport counter for genuine service .

    Some places in the world have ticket offices .

    Mobile phones and emails are artificial .

  2. I waited for months for my reservation to be ticketed when going to Japan this year. I called them several times and they just said to wait.

  3. I ran into an issue once where I booked an award ticket a few hours before departure from Qatar to JFK on American and JFK to Chicago on JetBlue. I ended up having difficulty getting them to ticket it in time for me to depart. Fortunately, there was someone at the Qatar airport (I think the person worked for Qatar Airways) who works on fixing problems such as this and he was able to fix it, but I never realized how big of a pain that it would be.

  4. Great information. I had a very similar experience this summer with AA award travel to Alaska where the flights were on.AA with connection to Alaska Airways. My connection changed multiple times, but the AA ticket was not reissued. I heard the same explanations and excuses and each airline pointed me to the other. Many phone calls later, the ticketing was corrected.

  5. I booked travel on AA with AAdvantage miles for my family of three for a trip from PHL to SFO. I didn’t notice at the time that AA only charged my credit card $12 twice instead of three times, and there was never any indication on the website or by email that there was any issue, until we couldn’t check in 24 hours before the flight. I should have called, but instead I only found at the airport check in desk that they’d only ticketed two of us despite it all being a single reservation, with the miles deducted for all three of us.

  6. If American Airlines are gonna pull such Shady crap on travelling customers,then maybe someone should be holding this airline company accountable for their bad actions and at the same time, I also think that travelling customers of AA should be made aware of these sorts of shady actions of AA,so they’ll have lots of time to cancel their tickets

  7. If you think AA is bad, try dealing with Turkish airlines for a partner award booking. You’ll be grateful that AA at least has agents that can fix a reservation unlike Turkish agents who are incapable of doing anything and simply tell you to fill out a feedback form.

  8. Also know that while AA.com lets you put a reservation on hold for 5 days, the partner airline may view it as an unticketed reservation and cancel it. That is at least true with Etihad. With the no fee cancellation charges I now don’t take the risk with partner award flights.

  9. Last year CX canceled my on hold award reservations thru AA that were not ticketed within a day.

  10. Depending on the airline and location, counter staff aren’t even airline employees.

    Counters often are unstaffed when there is not an impending departure.

    City ticket offices — or even hotel ticket counters — havent been a thing for at least 10 years.

  11. @alert If you don’t like things that are artificial then why are you on this blog? Don’t you know planes are artificial?

  12. “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.”

    Actually, that’s not true. If an award ticket is in limbo for a few weeks, AA will send an email stating there is an issue with an award reservation and to call them immediately (no specifics). It might be an ExecPlat specific thing as the number in the generic email was the ExecPlat number:

    Happened with two of mine. Calling up shows that for some reason the taxes didn’t go through on the initial purchase and they quickly fixed it.

  13. This seems to be a uniquely American issue. It happened to me once…I arrived at JFK to check-in for a first-class redemption on Cathay Pacific to Vancouver, and the agent had no record of my flight. It turns out AA never issued the ticket. I had to call their call center, and it took them nearly 90 minutes to get it pushed through, ticketed, and visible to the CX check-in agents. Thank god I had enough time…but I would have preferred spending it in the lounge rather than outside of security panic-calling AA multiple times. Thankfully, the Krug washed all the stress away.

  14. What Susan said above about it taking months for her flight to Japan to be ticketed is not encouraging. I’m going on 4 days now for my AA award flight to Japan on JAL to be ticketed. I sure hope mine doesn’t take that long. Can’t recall when using Delta miles or other airline miles going through this. I usually get ticketed within hours with other airline awards. Almost like AA is doing this intentionally to spite their award users & to discourage them from using their points. Last time this happened, I was able to find a replacement flight which got ticketed within hours (which is usually the norm), then cancelled my other flight still on request.

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