Don’t Make This One Mistake Now That US Airways Website No Longer Books Flights

by Gary Leff

Update: Per American the redirect from the US Airways website over to AA.com is temporary while IT performs maintenance on the US Airways website.

Pizza in Motion pointed out that you can no longer search flights at USAirways.com. Instead, when you enter search information you get redirected to the AA.com website.

Now, American and US Airways flights become one on October 17. From that date onward there will only be American Airlines flights.

For travel through October 16, though, customers have been advised that they are better off booking US Airways flights directly. That’s especially true for elites — if you book an American codeshare for a US Airways flight, you cannot upgrade until check-in. Elites clearly should be booking US Airways flights through US Airways and American flights through American until there’s no more US Airways at all.

But the US Airways website isn’t letting you book travel at all.

You get sent to AA.com and what displays for US Airways flights are American Airlines codeshares — exactly what you do not want.

Now, while getting sent to the AA.com website from US Airways only displays US Airways codeshare flights, you can get US Airways’ actual flight numbers to come up at AA.com.

You need to start a new flight search, and specify that you want to see ‘all carriers’ in your results (strangely, specifying to include oneworld airlines won’t work even though US Airways is part of oneworld).

Then you need to skip over American Airlines codeshare results, which will come up first, in order to get to true US Airways flights.

This is going to confuse many people who will clearly probably wind up booking American Airlines codeshares for travel on US Airways and wind up without advance upgrades (and lower upgrade chances as a result).

Another booking: if you want to book US Airways flights for travel through October 16, book through an online travel agency like Orbitz instead of booking direct so that you can book the US Airways flight number without any machinations. Make sure your frequent flyer number passes through and an upgrade is requested (which should be automatic).

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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  4. Is your entire website now outsourced to morons in the Philippines, or just the clickbait headlines?

    You are scum.

  5. I thought this post was really clear and helpful. I wouldn’t want to have inadvertently followed the US Airways website over to American and purchased a codeshare ticket and lost my upgrade.

    THANK YOU. Please ignore idiots like Bobo. What kind of a person must he be if he calls you such things when you write and explain things to us like this which can only make our travels better?

    There will always be complainers and ‘scum’ out there. Just keep doing what you’re doing and know that most of us appreciate it!!!

  6. I think we all would have preferred if AA sent out an email about this, especially to elites. I also noticed at the DCA AC that a password is now required for Wi-Fi. I don’t know if this is systemwide or just at DCA or a select few locations. Again, no email or advanced notice.

    Things like extra passwords, steps, additional process, aren’t good for #paxex especially if there unannounced and they have a disparate impact on AA’s most frequent customers.

    I was sitting and got my computer all set up, and then had to go out of the business center to find an AA representative. It was defenetly a very first world problem, but it added friction to my #paxex. I imagine this clunky setup with US flights will add friction to peoples #paxex unless the carrier changes the IT so that it will automatically upgrade an elite at the window regardless of code-share.

    Both these situations could have easily been remediated by proactive email communication, and thus not discovered out in the wild.

  7. Thanks Gary – it seems like even using this method, we’re going to lose the ability to view US Airways seatmaps (at least from what I can see, there doesn’t appear to be a way to see the seatmap on the AA.com website). Any idea for workarounds for those of us who tend to check seatmaps as part of the booking decision process?

  8. @Andrew you can see seatmaps through OTAs. And the US Airways issue will hopefully be resolved soon. Meanwhile it looks like USAirways.com is no longer auto-redirecting searches, it just tells you to go to aa.com.

  9. @ Mika Pyyhkala. I saw this too at JFK today and was told too many people were logging on who were not in the club but outside.
    @ Gary Thank you for all your info. You are truly helpful!!!

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