A couple weeks ago I wrote about the inability of American Airlines agents to confirm award space on Air Tahiti Nui. This wasn’t just a couple bad agents, but a recurring problem experienced over dozens of calls and days. Thankfully, a workaround is now available!
Here’s How to Book Air Tahiti Nui Award Space on American Airlines
Call up AA and agents still will tell you there is no award space. Even good agents. But reader Mike left an immensely helpful comment in my last article:
If your agent can’t figure it out, tell them to try this:
Promo Box- leave empty
Carrier Code Box- TN
Inventory Box- ADVThat seems to get the information they need.
I am pleased to report that this works like a charm. Of course I have no idea what exactly “promo box” and “inventory box” mean. I do know TN is the code for Air Tahiti Nui. But it doesn’t matter: agents know what you mean.
We’ve tried this six times over the last several days at Award Expert and it has not failed. From what I can gather, rather than using the standard award system, AA agents must look for award space on Air Tahiti Nui as if they were booking a revenue (paid) ticket.
Another Important Air Tahiti Nui Award Booking Tip
Remind agent that “I” class designates business class awards and “W” class economy class. Agents are used to “X” or “T” for economy, “U” for business, and “Z” or “P” for first class. But Air Tahiti Nui is not part of oneworld. Twice agents have followed my advice but still claimed there was no space. It was only after I reminded them of the proper booking codes that they located it.
What I Appreciate About AA Phone Agents
Unlike Delta and many United agents, who seem to absolutely hate correction or even a gentle suggestion when booking awards, all AA agents we have spoken to have been willing to listen. AA has agents from both the old AA and US Airways side booking award travel.
Of course we still miss US Airways agents so much…
CONCLUSION
A pretty complex workaround for an obscure AA partner, but immensely helpful if you are trying to get to Paris or Tahiti. As always, if this is just far too complicated you are invited to reach out to Award Expert for personalized concierge assistance.
Tahiti is on my bucket list so this is valuable information for me, thanks! 😀
“Unlike Delta and many United agents, who seem to absolutely hate correction or even a gentle suggestion when booking awards, all AA agents we have spoken to have been willing to listen.”
I had one semi-bad experience with an AA agent who refused to listen. AA’s system, for those familiar with it, has a tendency not to properly pass the middle-name field to certain partner award tickets. My full name, which was crucial to match my passport, was partially inside the middle name field. She insisted on typing the name exactly as my profile instead of a simple concatenation of both first and middle names into the first name field.
basically i was forced to cancel the award hold, potentially lose the partner award space, and try again.
Although this was many years ago, when I checked in at LAX (arriving on AA) I had to ask the agent to confirm my AA number for the TN flights to PPT, but the agent said, I’m sorry your fare code is not eligible to earn miles. I had to tell her to look again. She was looking at the AA segment which had a different letter fare code than the TN flights which had eligible fare codes.
Then again I don’t think the gate agent was even a TN employee, but a ground services agent instead.
Point is a little education is sometimes needed but try to do it politely
How did this compare to availability in Expert Flyer? Did your method find seats even though Expert Flyer did not show availability for award seats? Or should you check Expert Flyer first and not push the AA agent unless you see availability there?
Matched perfectly with Expert Flyer
When are the dates MilesSaaver awards for the South Pacific? There is a category in the award chart but no info in the “Details about award travel” at the top of the page?
Thanks!
No specific dates or blackout dates–just depends on when Air Tahiti Nui has released space.
Could Delta’s system have a similar issue? I have found availability on ExpertFlyer for numerous flights but every Delta agent has said they cannot see it in their system.
What route? Delta can’t book lax-cdg.
LAX-PPT
Odd. I had no trouble booking with DL for a client recently.
FWIW, I just put TN flights on hold with AA and didn’t need to feed them any of the info. So maybe its fixed for the agents to view.
When you had them hold seats was it within 331 days out? With ATN releasing award seats further out than they used to and beyond AA agents ability to see them (what is talked about in this blog post is probably only talking about within 331 days) it has become more difficult to use AA miles to French Polynesia. Maybe the bloggers can correct me if I’m wrong on that. I used to be able to have AA place a hold on award seats a little further out than 331 for ATN, but have not been able to now since ATN releases even futher out than in past.
I should correct my comment above. I’ve only been ale to hold award seats within 331 days out when using AA miles. Some other airlines are able to go out further than AA. I suspect AA will evetually change to beyond 331 if they want to keep up.
Just leaving a note here that this trick worked for my agent again today! Thank you for posting it!
It looks like the US call center sees the availability (and can book the ticket within 15 minutes), but every time I called UK number the agents could not find anything even using the aforementioned instructions.
I have coach tickets through a tour group and called to try and upgrade with miles, AA agent told me that they could not upgrade, they can only book. Is this correct or is there another workaround? Thanks.
There’s still no mentioning in this article / comments on how many AA miles does it cost to book the Air Tahiti tickets? Does anyone have any rough information this?
40K one-way economy, 80K one-way business.
This info is out of date now. I and W booking codes are old. Need to search for F and U, however I will say that I see U9 on expert flyer for a certain date and gave the 3 specific directions to agents and they still couldn’t find seats, so I don’t feel very confident in F and U either.
I already wrote an update to this six months ago–
https://liveandletsfly.boardingarea.com/2018/01/26/air-tahiti-nui-award-class-fare-codes/
Trying to book LAX-PAR w/ AA miles and the agent says it’s coming back unconfirmed from TN so he has no way to book it 🙁
And you confirmed the space on Expert Flyer?
I did. EF shows 3 dates with availability in my time window. AA cannot confirm the departure date, only the return.
Hi Shannon, keep trying. If you continue to run into a wall, considering enlisting the aide of Award Expert (awardexepert.com)
I’ve called every day. Agents show availability but cannot confirm the flight. One agent said that TN is having an issue and no award flights LAX-PAR can be confirmed for 4/25/19 thru 7/8/19. I assume this is the same on Air France but I am hold with them now just to check. (Expert Flyer shows 9 seats available on three different days.)