For years, I’ve relied on the BA.com award engine to find pretty much all Oneworld options.
I generally use American Airlines miles to book the flights, but until AA.com gets better at showing the full range of Oneworld carriers, we need other options.
BA.com has been the default for many of us, simply because it’s pretty easy to use (you can easily click each day within a 7 day window for availability in all cabins), and shows just about any Oneworld option, as long as it works within BA’s award routing rules.
A few times over recent months, I’ve had the British Airways site fail me. I’ll get a “No Availability” message there and the find availability elsewhere. This happened today searching flights to the Maldives. I was basically just searching for any day in December.
BA.com showed absolutely nothing on Dec 15th.
But then Qantas showed me a coach flight on Cathay Pacific.
Curious if it might be phantom availability on Qantas, I went to the source at CathatPacific.com. Alas, their site is down for maintenance.
So I hopped onto JAL.com. JAL’s site is quite hard to use for “general” searches for Oneworld, as you have to search airline by airline and it can lose your search parameters along the way. But it’s just fine for double checking a flight.
And again, this same Cathay Pacific routing appeared available.
The moral of the story:
If you are hunting Oneworld availability, aside from the obvious of don’t call AA or use aa.com to search, you should always consider using two Oneworld to double check – especially if you are getting no results. I personally think that Qantas is a great second choice to use in conjunction with BA as it will let you see journeys by the month. It will also show you Emirates flights (which you can book on Qantas and transfer in Citi ThankYou points – though beware the surcharges!) if you don’t have Amex membership Rewards to transfer to Emirates directly.
What do you use to search Oneworld award availability? Let me know here, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group.
New to all of this? My new “introduction to miles and points” book, MilesTalk: Live Your Wildest Travel Dreams Using Miles and Points is available now.
