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One of the primary frustrations with award travel can be the lack of available premium award seats. You set your travel goals, spend money on the right cards and accrue miles but if there are no seats available when you want to fly, or the only seats available come with hefty surcharges and taxes, it can feel like a pointless exercise.
Premium availability is not always easy to find on American, so when good value award seats open up, you need to act fast.
The award space shown below is for winter 2016/17 for flights from the US to Europe. Some of the most popular routes into London and Paris are wide open for travel in early 2017, but you will need to act fast. Having such a large number of seats open up for premium cabin international on American, and it being widely publicized online, these seats will fill up quickly.
All searches below are for two business class award seats on direct one-way flights operated by American Airlines. This does not include flying partners, so all awards incur only the $5.60 extra fee.
Dallas – Paris
Paris – Dallas
New York – Paris
Paris – New York
Although the searches shown are for two seats, searches for 3 or more seats also turn up good availability. We found plenty of open seats in all the cities below as this post went live.
United States:
- New York
- Dallas
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
- Philadelphia
- Miami
Europe:
- London
- Paris
- Frankfurt
There will most likely be other cities showing a wide selection of premium cabin award seats, but the only way to know is to go through them one-by-one. Seats into and out of London also have ample premium award options.
Chicago – London
London – Chicago
Los Angeles – London
London – Los Angeles
Final Thoughts
Looking at how many seats American has opened up, this is the best chance we have seen in recent times to book family sized groups into business class transatlantic award travel on American Airlines.
With this amount of availability, it will also mean there is plenty of room for upgrades. If you have already booked flights or are happy to pay for economy tickets upfront, upgrading to business and first class is one of the primary goals of collecting points and miles, and right now is the perfect time to start redeeming those hard earned AAdvantage miles.
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