American Airlines online: a powerful, easy-to-use booking site for all your flights.
Written: Aug 05 '04 (Updated Aug 05 '04)
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American Airlines' web site, accessed at www.aa.com or www.americanairlines.com gets my vote for best in class among airline sites. In fact, based on its breadth and depth of capability and its straightforward navigation, I rate it as one of the best commercial sites on the web. It provides a web-based platform to access almost anything you could possibly want to do with American Airlines.
Background
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and although I don't travel a lot, I do make one or two trips a year, generally within the USA, to Europe or to Mexico. Over the years, I've found that American Airlines (AA) is almost always able to cover my itinerary at a competitive price, and with occasional exceptions, other airlines aren't. I'm also a member of AAdvantage, AA's frequent flyer program.
When I first started using AA's web site many years ago, I wasn't impressed. Like most other commercial web sites, it was difficult to navigate and offered very limited capability. Fortunately, over the years, AA has put lot's of money into its on-line presence, and now just about any service offered by AA is accessible on-line.
Making Reservations
The site makes it very easy to book round trip, one way or multi-city flights of up to four legs. You can search for flights by date and time if you need to travel on specific days or by fare if you are more concerned about price. When you search by date, the site provides a list of potential flights for each leg of your journey and you must choose which ones you want before it quotes a price. When you search by fare, it displays complete itineraries with their total prices, and you just choose one.
At the beginning of the process, you tell the system whether you are buying a normal ticket or are planning to pay with frequent flyer miles. In the latter case, the system only displays itineraries with available frequent flyer seats, and it quotes the cost in terms of frequent flyer miles. In either case, you just click ahead to pay. If there are no seats available on the days you choose, the system suggests nearby dates
At this time, the system does not support multi-city itineraries to be paid with frequent flyer miles, although this is easy to accomplish by phoning AA. I understand they intend to support this in the future.
Site Organization
The home page provides a huge amount of capability organized in a very compact and straightforward way.
Of course, the top menu on this page is the reservations menu. In addition to making reservations, this menu has tabs for tracking your existing reservations and performing flight check-in, a great feature.
Below that is the flight status menu where you can get the departure and arrival information for flights, check flight schedules of all airlines, and arrange flight status notifications for your email, phone, cell phone, pager or PDA. In addition, there's a summary of your frequent flyer miles, a tab for purchasing upgrades, and a tab for managing your subscriptions to various AA email services.
There are also sections for AA news and offers.
The home page (and other pages) have multi-level menus that allow you to access all capabilities of the site. For example, the Reservations menu selection opens a submenu that allows you to book flights, cars, hotels and AA Vacations, to check your reservations and available seats, to purchase upgrades, get refunds, and deal with prepaid or group travel. Under the Book Flights selection, you can book one way, round trip or multi-city itineraries as well as flights to be paid for with frequent flyer miles. This is just a tiny sample of the available capabilities.
There's a huge section with special offers including so called NetSAAver fares and a large group of pages that handle every aspect of the AAdvantage frequent flyer program.
Best Things
With so much going on, it's easy to miss some of the site's outstanding features, which include:
-- AA gives you 500 frequent flyer miles for every flight segment you book on the site
-- internet check-in, which allows you to print your boarding pass within 48 hours of your flight
-- the ability to change your seat assignments as many times as you wish, using detailed schematics of the cabin to find good seats
-- complete access to your AAdvantage frequent flyer account with list of all transactions
Problems
With all the capabilities, it is sometimes difficult to figure out how to get from here to there, especially how to back out of a multi-step process without starting over. Fortunately, starting over always works.
Like many popular web sites, this one is never really fast, and at peak times it gets very slow. Having put so much money into site design, doesn't it make sense to invest in more and/or faster servers?
The last trip I booked with AA was from San Jose, California to Rome, Italy. Originally, I needed to change planes at JFK, but AA changed its schedule such that the layover was too short. On the plus side, AA automatically changed my itinerary to go through Chicago instead. This was readily apparent when I reviewed my reservation online, but AA never sent a notice to alert me to the change until I received updated e-tickets in the mail nearly a month later.
Related Links
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Traveling outside the USA?
-- The most popular frequent flyer miles credit card costs you 3% extra every time you use it outside the USA.
-- This credit card will save you 2 to 3 per cent on every foreign transactions.
Recommended:
Yes
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Book domestic and international flights.
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Member: Jim J
Location: Santa Cruz, California
Reviews written: 190
Trusted by: 78 members
About Me:
#7 in Personal Finance, #14 in Travel. My goal? Saving you money.
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