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I hate American Airlines, and one of the many reasons is that they seem to have made their air miles policy as obscure and convoluted as possible, so they can claim to have good reward policy but deter you from taking advantage of it.
Anyway.. I have 27k miles and my wife has some too, and I want to use them to get money off our family trip later in the year. I only seem to be able to buy a whole single ticket with miles, rather than use a combination of miles and cash to fund the whole trip like you do with hotels.
And I would rather redeem the points with a different airline too.. can you do that?
Collecting miles with an individual airline is not the same as the Airmiles program, where you could buy a ticket with a combination of Airmiles+cash (and not pay the taxes/fees). You are being 'rewarded' for brand loyalty but you need to travel a lot to really get the benefit.
The simple answer is No, not really. But that's a bit simplified. Most schemes allow you to use miles to buy hotel rooms as well as pay for the 'fare' part of air tickets or upgrades (from an expensive economy or business ticket) and sometimes car hire too. But it is obvious that you can usually get all of these things cheaper if you search the web, find sale fares and aren't pciky with the brand you use.
Although you can collect with an alliance of airlines, so that flights from different airlines acrue miles in the same 'club', you can only spend those miles through the airline you are saving with. So the flights need to be a code share with, in your example, AA. The positive to all this is, as far as I am aware AA is reasonably 'cheap' in terms of the miles you need for award flights. You can usually see what carrier a flight is with when you go to book it (i.e. the transatlantic flights will be BA or AA so just pick the BA ones). You can't transfer miles between the different airlines in the alliance. But 27k isn't that much and I doubt it will get you much except perhaps an internal US flight for which the 'fare' will be tiny anyway (noting you pay taxes and fees on a reward ticket). Better to hold on to the miles and try and save up towards the 100,000's. Then you can look at upgrades / free flights / good hotels in US cities that would otherwise cost $200 a night.
AA have traditionally been very generous with their scheme, but all of the airlines are having to tighten their belts and you will see on forums many people are very unhappy with the lack of availability of upgrades nowadays, on most airlines. I would recommend you see it as a perk, that if you happen to fly a few more times with OneWorld airlines and keep the account going, you might get a nice upgrade in a few years time.
Thanks for the reply.. what I would like to do is see if I can save money by buying a single ticket with the miles, then a return with money, then by three returns with my family. Should save me £250, but it would be a right faff. This is a family visit, so hotels and cars aren't needed.
It is also enough to get an upgrade for one of the tickets. I'm sure my wife can handle the kids back there in economy... 🙂