Quick Update and a Tip on Booking Your Last US Airways Star Alliance Awards

I’m not dead. I’m just not updating. I will eventually get around to finishing up this trip report, but for a variety of reasons which I might delve into at some point, this blog has taken a back seat to the rest of the things going on in my life. I might also have a guest trip reporter! That would be exciting.

Anyway, to be more helpful, if you’re like me and looking to spend some US Airways miles while they’re still in Star Alliance, you need to book your awards this weekend. As in today or tomorrow, since they’re transitioning to oneworld on Monday, March 31st. But if you call the US Airways number (1-800-428-4322) and say that you want to book award travel, you might get a pre-recorded message telling you to call back later since they’ve been receiving too many calls and not even get the option to wait on hold (this happened to me this morning).

This can happen when there’s extreme weather, in which case I definitely think that you shouldn’t tie up an agent’s time with a premium cabin award booking when they really should be trying to help the thousands of people who have been affected. But a quick search reveals no real inclement weather anywhere today, so the lines are just tied up because lots of people are booking awards this weekend.

What to do? Well, instead of saying that you want to talk to an agent about award travel, tell the voice tree that you want to talk about an existing reservation. I was able to get an agent essentially immediately using this strategy.

Caveat #1: Some agents obviously don’t like this, and you’ll have to explain why you don’t have an existing reservation that you want to talk about and instead are trying to book a new award reservation. Since so much of the US Airways award booking process is based on the agent that you get, this could be problematic if you get started off on the wrong foot.

Caveat #2: Don’t abuse this! If there are actually lots of people who need to get rebooked because of weather delays and such, you shouldn’t be a dick and tie up 40 minutes of an agent’s time so you can fly first class to Bangkok through Europe for only 120k miles because you confused the agent into thinking that Bangkok is in North Asia, especially if your booking isn’t urgent. In this case, since the “weather” that the voice recording is talking about is really just lots of other award bookers, I don’t feel so bad, especially since the bookings do have to be done this weekend.