tl:dr – It could be phantom availability, or maybe not.
The other day, I was attempting to use Atmos Rewards points to book an American Airlines business class flight from the US to Brazil. After confirming the award availability, both on seats.aero and directly on Alaska’s site, I navigated to the payment page, filled out all the necessary details, and hit “Pay” only to receive this error:
Now this Partner Booking has been around for a bit – it made waves a few years back, and though Alaska has largely fixed many of the issues surrounding it, it still rears its pesky head from time to time.
The trouble is that sometimes the error is legitimate (and frustrating) in the sense that the underlying reason Alaska is truly unable to confirm partner awards space is that it doesn’t exist. Thus, the award flights Alaska is showing are ‘phantom.’ You might be more likely to encounter this phenomenon when booking Korean Air or Condor award flights.
More often than not, though, the flight does exist, and you’ll need to try one of two things to successfully book your award:
- Clear your browser’s cache and cookies and try again, and/or try booking on a different browser or mobile.
- Call up Alaska’s support and have a customer service agent book the award for you.
In my case, I tried step 1 and was unsuccessful, so I did what everyone loves (hates) to do and called in to support. Thankfully, I wasn’t on hold for too long (~15 minutes), and the agent who fielded my call was super helpful in getting the award booked.
So, nothing groundbreaking here, but more of an FYI that your award flight may very well exist, and at the very least, you should call in to confirm.
