Business ExtrAA is the American Airlines small business program, where points are earned in parallel to AAdvantage miles. It’s an opportunity to double dip — you add your Business ExtrAA number to reservations and earn business points, while the traveler earns frequent flyer miles as usual.
And then you redeem the points for travel, or Gold elite status or lounge access.
Points expire in the program. Points earned during a year expire December 31 two years following. All points in the Business ExtrAA program earned in 2012 and not yet redeemed expire today. So today is a pretty important day for the program.
And all award redemption options have disappeared off of the Business ExtrAA website.
If you have Business ExtrAA points expiring, I would call customer service to redeem today rather than waiting for redemptions to be live on the website again. They can be reached by phone at 1-800-457-7072.
I have a couple of calls in to see what’s going on. I hope to learn something soon.
It seems to me that if redemption is down on the day points expire that they will need to offer some sort of extension!
Update: As of 10:58 a.m. Eastern the Business ExtrAA website appears to be functioning again and allowing award redemption. A rather inconveniently-timed glitch, but one that was fixed quickly!
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EF also notes that O,I and X award class searches seem to be “down” for US – wonder if its more widespread than that.
“Due to a technical issue in the US Air host system, O,I,X award classes are temporarily not viewable in ExpertFlyer, however J class upgrades still are. US Air is working on a fix, however due to the holidays it won’t be available until the first week in January. The AA/US team passes along their apologies. Thank you for your understanding.”
back up.