Easy: Changing AAdvantage Award flight via Twitter DM

A few weeks ago I’ve published a post on choosing the best mileage options for my kids’ summer trip to Michigan. My husband and I won’t be going, so my MIL will be in charge. I’ve mentioned that I ended up choosing an AA flight from Detroit to Fort Myers mainly due to low price (9.5k AA miles). There was one wrinkle: a 30-minute connection in DC. That’s less than ideal, to put it mildly, considering my MIL’s age.

But she agreed, since I’m paying. To be honest, I wasn’t sure we would end up keeping it. But I figured there was zero risk reserving it now and deciding later. Truth be told, I was hoping that there would be a change in schedule, which would potentially enable me to pick a much better option. Well, that’s exactly what ended up happening.

I kept checking the reservation every few days and noticed that they were now rescheduled on a flight leaving at 6:30 AM instead of noon. Interestingly, I never got an email notification, which is another reason to “babysit” your airline reservations religiously. Some programs, like Avianca, are notoriously bad in this regard.

Anyway, I didn’t want to potentially spend an hour (or longer) on the phone, so I contacted American Airlines via DM on Twitter. I listed my preferred flight option and asked to get my family rebooked at no cost. About twenty minutes later, I got a response that it was taken care of. No long holds, no clueless agents to deal with. Just beautiful!

So far, I’ve had an excellent experience with AA team on Twitter, and highly recommend it. Of course, it assumes that you don’t have an urgent request because sometimes it can take them a few hours to get back to you. But even if you hate social networking and Twitter in particular, I do recommend getting an account for things like these.

I try to avoid phone calls at all costs, so using Chat and Twitter is always preferable. Last year I’ve actually booked AA award flights with Asia Miles via Chat, something  most people probably aren’t even aware of. It certainly beats calling their office in Hong Kong. I wasn’t aware this option even existed until I tried it. When it was impossible to reach Lufthansa via phone right when EU was getting ready to close border due to Covid pandemic, I was able to contact them on Facebook.

No downside in making speculative reservations via (most) miles

As long as there is no penalty to cancel, it makes sense to reserve less desirable award flight options. The route we ended up with would have originally cost me 21k AA miles per person.

Instead, I paid 9.5k miles, which is a terrific deal. Just don’t forget to cancel if you don’t intend to take the flight. I’m speaking from experience, as I came very close to losing 35k miles due to being so disorganized.

Author: Leana

Leana is the founder of Miles For Family. She enjoys beach vacations and visiting her family in Europe. Originally from Belarus, Leana resides in central Florida with her husband and two children.