American Airlines Award Search Engine Now Displaying Alaska Airlines Flights

Since November 11, 2011, the American Airlines award search engine has started to display Alaska Airlines award availability. This is great news since before this change happened, you had to call in to use your AA miles on Alaska Airlines flights, meaning an extra $25 per ticket issued over the phone. Now, you can directly search for and book your Alaska Airlines award tickets on AA.com without any additional booking fees. You can also continue to hold award seats for 5 days. Hopefully, this is a precursor to AA.com finally displaying some OneWorld partner award seats as well... though I'm not holding my breath.

In addition, if you still have some British Airways Avios points left after the devaluation on November 16, this is a great way to search for Alaska Airlines award seats since they are also a partner airline. BA's website currently does not display Alaska Airlines award seats in their search engine, so you will still need to call in to do the actual booking. But using the AA website, you can now see exactly which Alaska Airlines flights has partner award seats available before calling in, so you can plan out your itinerary accordingly. BA's award program has become distance-based now, so using your Avios points to book Alaska Airlines award flights might actually be quite a bit cheaper than using your AAdvantage or Mileage Plan miles!