American Airlines Award Map Glitch: Fly To ‘Retardville’ And ‘Allahu Akbar’

by Gary Leff

The American Airlines award map shows where you can fly based on a starting city and number of available miles that you specify. It’s a tool that’s been around for about a dozen years, and is useful if you want to see where you can go (for example) for 6,500 miles in coach.

When you search for flights you’ll see a map of available cities including some interesting destinations,

  • Retardville (Los Angeles)
  • Penis (Paris)
  • Allahu Akbar (London

AA Award Map shows London as “Allahu Akbar” and Paris as “Penis”
byu/Frequent-Butterfly33 inamericanairlines

View post on imgur.com

Pittsburgh was also ‘Shitville,’ a “missed opportunity to write Shittsburgh.”

It seems that American Airlines didn’t license a map for this tool, and is instead pulling OpenStreetMap tiles. OpenStreetMap is a user-edited tool like Wikipedia and anyone can update, fix, or… vandalize it. Someone keeps changing city names, and other users revert them, in an ongoing battle.

(HT: Points and PDBs and @PokeTraveling)

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

  2. Oh well. I occasionally find similar things in Wikipedia where minor historical characters get crazy and often gross biographies. Fix them when I see them, but somebody can change them again in 5 minutes. It is one reason I tell my students not to trust open sources, but how many people just believe whatever they read on the Internet?

  3. If people were just relying on wikipedia and openstreetmap for all their knowledge of the world, it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, I have encountered many who feel that the information provided by their favorite influencers on tiktok is well-researched and reliable.

  5. “Retardville” fits Los Angeles to a “T” . The film “actresses” and “actors” are total morons .

  6. One AI weakness is that it can’t tell the difference between correct and obviously incorrect like we can(or at least we should) The further off the well worn path the more likely it’s got faulty info.

  8. The name for Los Angeles is incredibly derogatory and should not be posted in full.

  9. San Francisco was referred LiberalFudgePackerHomelessDrugAddictsville

  10. Is the R word now really in the same category as words that will get you cancelled?

  11. Gary – Word on the street in Pittsburgh is that Appleton, Wisconsin was called “Simpleton.” Not a missed opportunity there.

  12. To Met’s fan. Not humorous or funny. The year is 2024, not 1924. The west coast attitude’s are starting to change. Most of the homeless are not from California, they came from across the country. This is a nation wide problem. Ignoring it leads to the mess we’re in now. As for your slurs, you might want to be a lot more original than that.

  14. Paraphrase: “Extremely derogatory words should not be posted in full.”
    Can we please stop acting like everywhere needs to be Happy Fun Kid Town?
    We are adults. This is a site for adults.
    Plenty of people in the world do and say bad things. Some of it is disturbing. The world is a real place fully of shitty people, and this is reflected in reporting that covers their shitty activities.
    We do not need to be coddled.
    Please grow up and stop advocating for censorship.

  15. If that were the only misinformation found on the Internet we’d all be in a better place.

  16. @ Mets Fan – seriously?? Do you now feel like such a better person after writing your juvenile and homophobic words?

  17. I’m a homo and not offended by MetsFans use of FudgePacker.

    Most of of ‘mos have a sense of humor and can handle words just fine, well let me back up – those of us from GEN X. “Sticks & stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me”.

    I wanna go change some city names now!

    thanks for this Gary!

  18. We actually starting using “retard” in the office again, and it’s great.

    Derogatory doesn’t mean off limits.

  19. I am also a homo and completely not offended by fudgepacker.

    I also live in LA (within the map provided too) and I can confirm that it’s called Retardville because I live there.

    I can confirm again that I am a homosexual, I am pretty slow and I do live in LA. I fear that people will read this and think that I’m somehow slurring my similar ilk but I’m not. This is my reality.

  20. To any developers that write code, never put in “joke” or “memes” in testing code, comments, or in test databases. You never know who screws up and makes that data live.

  21. This isn’t a glitch. The software is showing exactly what it’s supposed to show, which is the city name in the data. It’s not generating it by accident or getting data from the wrong place. Those names didn’t end up in the system by accident. The system is working properly but they chose a terrible way to implement it by using something where people can change data intentionally.

    Wikipedia has a feature to prevent vandalism on pages that are likely targets by making pages protected or semi protected.

    The airline can’t control that data directly, but they can compare new data to what’s in their system and have a team review changes.

  22. To the poster dissing LA: retard is preferable to puerile cretin, which applies to poster.

  23. Lol, nope, Metsfan- but the AA map got it right with renaming Flushing “Loserville”…

Comments are closed.