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American Airlines has introduced a cool new Award Map, which tries to make award booking easier. It seems pretty useless to me. I want to be wrong. Please tell us in the comments how it can be useful.
The Award Map lets you input your home airport and either a destination region or goal. Your options:
You also input the number of passengers, how many miles you have, what cabin you want, whether it’s one way or roundtrip, and the dates.
Clicking search will hopefully generate a map of results that meet your criteria. On my first search of a week in the summer in Europe in business class, I got no results.
I changed the dates to November, and I had my pick of the litter.
So why do I find this feature useless?
1. It only shows the partners aa.com shows. That means Award Map is not any new information from aa.com, just a repackaging of old information.
2. There is no way to make the dates flexible, meaning you have to search over and over if your dates are flexible.
3. There’s no guide to how many miles a trip “should” cost, so people who don’t already know the award chart won’t be helped by Award Map.
I think the best possible use probably lies in the Interest section for last minute getaways. Choosing Beach or Ski might give you some destinations you didn’t think of.
But if that’s not of use to you, then I think American should have spent its programming capabilities on catching up to ba.com and qantas.com as places to search for oneworld availability. Am I missing anything?
The bottom line on Award Map is that it won’t put my Award Booking Service out of business. But maybe we can do that on our own with some of Bill’s awesome recent posts on the new way to hold United awards and negative 7,500 mile awards to Fiji. 😉
I think it’s incredible for finding low-level award availability to to places where I can then use avios (e.g., Caribbean).
Thank you. I love that use. That’s 1!
This is sad. The map is virtually useless. If I had found it myself I would think I was doing something wrong; it’s hard to beleive American would post this non-utilitarian page. I am going to pretend it’s a draft and wait for the release of the real map.
On the contrary, I think it’s incredibly useful for short getaways, when I would’t really be flying further than the US/Caribbean anyway (i.e. AA metal). 90% of the time my dates are inflexible, +/- 1 day at maximum on either side, so I love the set dates feature since it is my destination that is flexible.
Similar to David. I think it is useful for this. It would be more useful if you could add a +/- 1 date range.
David beat me to it! But he nailed it exactly. With full time jobs and the desire to maximize vacation time, dates aren’t really that flexible. You are thinking more along the lines of “where in the Caribbean can I go President’s day weekend?” rather than “when can I go to Laos in the next year?” For example, when I planned my first ever trip to Asia in December, the goal was to make Phuket one of the destinations. Other destinations were flexible, but the dates were fixed; I had to leave Friday after work on Dec 20 and come back Jan 1. It just worked out we’ll be doing 2 days in Singapore, 5 days in Phuket and 2 days in Tokyo, but we would have considered other cities.
Last December, I was looking for award availability to the Caribbean last minute. I searched most islands from NYC and eventually found SXM and CUN. I then went over and booked CUN with Avios. 10k each way!
Of course, I already made a little database table for myself of all hotels with points in the Caribbean hotels with points in the Caribbean so booking the hotel is easy 🙂
Wonderful new banner and slogan. Love the old bankers visor!
[…] I think it’s a fun new tool and one that most people should at least try the next time they are booking an award. But I also agree with Scott from MileValue, who called it “nearly useless.” […]
[…] I think it’s a fun new tool and one that most people should at least try the next time they are booking an award. But I also agree with Scott from MileValue, who called it “nearly useless.” […]