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Even though the super low 4,500-mile award band for short flights no longer applies to US routes, there are still plenty of ways to get great value from British Airways Avios. In fact, thanks to American recoding its domestic fare buckets, Avios awards are now 50% cheaper than before for most AA first-class flights in the US.
But once you’ve redeemed for an American award on the British Airways website, how do you find your booking on AA’s website? Since British Airways and American use different record locators, it used to be a real pain to track down the separate AA record locator in order to pull up the itinerary and choose seats.
Fortunately, American has now made this much easier, as you can simply use your BA record locator directly on aa.com. Make sure you’re not logged in, look for the “My trips/Check-in” tab on the home page and enter the passenger’s name and the BA record locator.
From here, click on “Find reservation” and American will retrieve your Avios booking, except it’ll now show the AA record locator at the top.
While you can find the record locator again this way in the future, it’s probably be a good idea to make a note of it in case you need it quickly for some reason at the airport or during your travels.
Also, when you first make the Avios booking, make sure to remove your Executive Club membership number from the reservation. It will auto-populate, but if you delete it and leave that field blank, you should be able to add your AAdvantage number instead on aa.com. This means you’ll get benefits if you have American elite status — at least the perks you can expect on an award ticket — or a free checked bag if you have the Citi / AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite MasterCard or the CitiBusiness / AAdvantage Platinum Select World MasterCard.
But don’t fret if you accidentally left your Avios number in the reservation. You can call American with the AA record locator and they’ll be happy to change it to your AAdvantage number for you.
Source: thepointsguy.com