American Airlines provides calendar view of available seats

Aptly reflecting their dual personalities as revenue generators for the airlines and frustration generators for travelers, airline mileage schemes have different names in different quarters. Within the airlines themselves, they're generally referred to as loyalty programs, with the emphasis on travelers' desired behavior. Among consumers, however, they're more apt to be known as travel rewards programs, with the emphasis on the carrot used to encourage travelers' loyalty.

But that carrot — free seats — has proved maddeningly elusive. The low-priced awards, starting in most programs at 25,000 miles for a roundtrip coach trip within the continental U.S., are capacity-controlled. Translation: they are in very limited supply; and on more popular flights, there may be no award seats offered at all.

DO IT YOURSELF ONLINE

As if the spotty availability of the most popular awards weren't enough of an impediment, the airlines added to the difficulty of securing a free seat by steering their customers away from phone bookings, for which most carriers now charge a "service fee," while encouraging use of their Web-based reservations applications.

The do-it-yourself approach works fine for paid reservations. But the airlines' online booking systems were never designed to navigate the tortuous ins and outs of reserving scarce and elusive award seats. To find an available seat, mileage program members typically are forced to attempt to make reservations flight by flight, day by day, until finally, maybe, the computer shows an available seat. Then they have to repeat the process to find a seat for the return flight.

Airlines warn that restricted award tickets are limited and that consumers might have to be flexible in their travel plans. But they've failed — or refused — to provide members of their programs with booking tools that support and encourage such flexibility.

Specifically, what has been conspicuously missing from the airlines' booking applications is a calendar view of available award seats.

So, for example, a customer wishing to use miles for capacity-controlled free flights from Chicago to Orlando, departing Dec. 1 and returning Dec. 12, would be presented not just with available seats on Chicago-Orlando flights for the specified dates, but also on flights the preceding and following days.

Until now, the best approximation of that ideal was Continental's. While a decided improvement over other carriers' day-by-day view of award availability, Continental's calendar view was primitive.

AMERICAN TAKES LEAD

After a year in development and testing, American's new online award-booking application has staked a legitimate claim to being the realization of every mile-collector's dream. And it certainly sets the standard to which other airlines must henceforth aspire.

To book award flights, travelers begin by entering origin and destination information and travel dates into the familiar online reservations form, prominently positioned on the AA.com homepage and elsewhere on American's Web site. Then, to shift into award mode, click "Redeem Advantage miles." And finally, to unleash the application's real power, check the "Dates Flexible" option.

After searching for available seats on the desired itinerary, the application displays two side-by-side calendars, one for the outbound flight, the other for the return. The requested dates are highlighted in the centers of both calendars, with the two weeks before and after also displayed. Each day is color-coded to indicate what types of awards are available.

While in calendar view, users can switch views to show different awards, comparing availability between restricted and unrestricted coach, for example, or between unrestricted coach and restricted first class.

Next, select a date and the application responds by displaying a list of available flights on that day. Available non-stops are listed first, followed by direct and connecting flights.

Once on a chosen day, bookers can use the large arrow icons to check alternate days, moving forward or backward one day at a time.

At all points in the process, the straightforward page navigation makes it simple to move backward or forward, to review and modify any of the reservation's elements. And visible throughout, the member's account balance is displayed in the upper-right corner as a reality check on redemption options.

American seems to have taken a lesson from Google, whose world-class search functionality is delivered via a decidedly plain interface. The new Advantage booking feature is similarly modest in appearance but deceptively robust and refreshingly user-friendly.

full transparency?

American has been an industry leader in both loyalty programs — Advantage was the first mileage scheme and 26 years later is the largest — and in Web-based travel applications. So it's fitting that American would be at the forefront of the airlines' drive to get award booking right.

The president of American's Advantage program, Kurt Stache, claims the new application provides "full transparency." That's not quite true: Full transparency would show not only whether award seats were available for a particular day and flight, but how many. Still, for most program members, whose priority is securing one or two free tickets for a flight to a sunny getaway destination, this will be all the transparency they need.

Reach Tim Winship at questions@frequentflier.com