Top 5 Reasons to Babysit Your Award Flight Booking

Sometimes a bit of OCD is useful, when it comes to double checking your award bookings. It's tempting to just book your award flight and forget about it, but there are several reasons you'll want to periodically check them. Here are a few, based on my work for my Award Booking Service clients and my own award flights, and feel free to comment with additional reasons or your experiences.

1. Did Your Award Flight Actually Ticket?

Particularly with American AAdvantage awards, you need to ensure your award actually ticketed. This is because all award tickets are queued for ticketing–they don't ticket instantly. The queue operates in order of departure date, so those flying soonest should ticket first. This can especially be critical when booking Cathay Pacific first class right before departure, which is also when Cathay Pacific tends to open most first class award availability. I can't stress this enough–make sure you have an e-ticket number and the operating airline's record locator such that you can pull up your ticket on that airline's Web site.

Even if you're booking an award sometime in the future, whether it's Qantas A380 First Class or Etihad First Class or another AAdvantage award flight, I would ensure that it has ticketed within a week of booking it. If it remains as “On Request” there may be something holding it up, such as an invalid credit card number or other issue with the award.

2. Has Award Space Opened Up for First Class or a Better Routing?

If you booked business class but are hoping for first class or booked economy but want business class, don't forget to regularly check back to see if award space has opened up for your desired class of service. Or perhaps it's opened up for another date or routing that you're willing to change to. You can set ExpertFlyer alerts for some airlines, but not all, so for airlines where no alerts are supported, you'll have to keep checking.

3. Has the Airline Changed the Flight Time or Dropped a Segment Without Notifying You?

Often flights will change by a few minutes and it's no big deal. But other times a flight may be eliminated entirely because the airline has stopped flying it. This happened to me earlier this year when Air Berlin stopped flying nonstop between St. Petersburg LED and Berlin TXL, resulting in having to go through Moscow. In the process, American actually deleted our Berlin-NYC Air Berlin Business Class award flight entirely (see What to Do if American Loses Your AAdvantage Award) and I had to get the AAdvantage liaison involved to get our business class award back.

4. Has the Aircraft Changed, Such That You'd Prefer to Book a Different Date or Route?

My main concern is with (ideally) booking first class or at least a flat bed seat, so I'm not as obsessed as some folks with flying the A380 or a particular aircraft. But if you are focused on a particular aircraft, you'll want to regularly check that your flight is still planned to be operated by that aircraft type. Of course, there's no guarantee, since there can be last minute equipment swaps, but if you spot an equipment change early enough, you may be able to switch to another date or route that has the plane type you want.

5. Has Your Seat Assignment Changed?

With some airlines, seating can be very frustrating–you select your seats, and then, with astonishing regularity, the airline changes them. Case in point: if you've booked two seats on an Air Berlin flight and both of you select the more private window seats, 8 times out of 10 Air Berlin will change you to middle seats.

Or recently, when I selected seats on TAM on an OTA Web site, completely different seats showed up in the confirmation. Calls and emails were needed to get back the original seats I selected. Bottom line: if you're particular about your seats, make sure you keep checking your reservation, as you may have been unilaterally moved and reseated in worse seats.