Ongoing British Airways Award tips series:

One question I got recently was a person who was booking a complex set of flights using British Airways Avios. He was booking US Air and American metal flights but had issues with checked bag fees, seat assignments, etc. It is very hard to get US Air phone agents to change your frequent flyer number on BA award tickets. AA phone agents seem more willing but calling them is about like going to the dentist (not fun).

This has been covered by many bloggers and posts but a couple tricks on this. You can manage BA award tickets and get your US or AA number assigned to these so you can take advantage of elite status or credit card status many times.

First option is to go to Finnair’s website. Select your country and language

Then it will let you enter your BA reservation info.

Once you complete that it will let you update your details

using the button on the bottom. You will just use the drop down to enter the frequent flyer program of choice. Save it and it “should” produce an eticket number that you can then use on US or AA website to manage seats, etc. It “should” also recognize your elite status.

Some reports of this site giving an error in recent months so your results may vary as it’s not a perfect science.

Another option is the Royal Jordanian trick I like to call the Camel Back Cutoff after one of my favorite Leave it to Beaver episodes. Go to that booking site and you’ll find:

Enter the BA confirmation number and passenger last name.  It “should” pull up your traveler info.

Just click on the “update” red button.

Update your information with the Oneworld program you want to to use and you “should” be able to access it through that carrier website and manage your booking, seats, etc.

All of this works most of the time with most reservations.

Another trick that has been mentioned is during the BA booking process, you are asked to provide the travelers name and details. Your Avios number is auto filled, but you can remove it or delete is which assigns no frequent flier number attached to the reservation.

Once you finish the booking on BA, you can log into your AA account, and go to “My Trips”. You “should” be able to pull up the reservation with the date and flight number. Now you will be able to add your AA number to the reservation, and you are done. Normally your Avios number would be there and it would be “greyed” out so that you can’t change it. By removing it at the initial time of booking, you allow yourself the option to manually add your Aadvantage number through AA. I haven’t tried this method but I would assume it works with US Air for now as well.

As a disclaimer your results may vary. How you do the booking, who is on the booking, etc. will effect this. I’ve had luck doing it on some reservations and I prefer the Finnair approach personally but I had trouble with it working 100% of the time lately as well. Even Wally and Eddie had trouble on the Camel back cutoff and ended up having to use Eddie’s non-rewards credit card. Ward was NOT happy about losing those airline miles let me tell you.