British Airways reward flight cancelled and rebooked with American Airlines

[walace]

I recently received an e-Mail which concerned me stating my upcoming reward flight with British Airways was cancelled, fortunately on opening the e-Mail they offered an equivalent flight on American Airlines which leaves within 30 minutes of my original departure time and I leave from Heathrow T3 rather than T5 (some interesting lounge options in T3 so no issues here)

I have accepted the flight change, however if I select the return flight (still with BA) I can select a seat, however when I transfer to AA for the outbound flight I don’t have an option to chose a seat and the booking shows the following message:

Please book your trip
Contact your travel agent or booking source to pay for your trip.

Interestingly the flight with AA is showing as confirmed on the BA website.

Any idea why I would get the message and why I can’t choose a seat? Anyone had similar issues when this happens?

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

You need the AA booking ref which is different from the BA one.

It usually shows in BA when you try to select on AA seat there. On the BA website is shows at the bottom left of the screen.

IIRC if you use Finnair manage booking it will show there after you’ve input the BA ref.

[e14]

Presumably this rebooking requirement happened recently ?

It sounds to me like the rebook robot hasn’t processed the reticketing yet, hence the reason why AA thinks the booking is unpaid and won’t let you select seats. If the travel is in the next 72 hours get on the phone to BA and ask to check if the flight has been re-ticketed following the invol reroute.

If the travel dates are in the future I’d give it about 10 days before calling

[walace]

The flight is in the summer so I haven’t really looked into it much until now. It was only as I was looking at seat reservations that I clicked through from BA to AA. The change was actually confirmed in December with BA so I would have thought it would have flowed through by this point to AA.

I have used the link directly through from BA to AA and also used the AA booking reference given to my by BA on the AA website. Both take me to the same page which does show the flight information, our names, class of travel etc. just with the odd message shown above.

My only thoughts are because I haven’t entered some personal information with BA, mainly my passport details as I need to renew this before travelling.

[walace]

** SOLVED ** After waiting for the storm related phone calls to die down I called BA and was able to establish the reason for this issue. BA acknowledged the AA reservation had been put on hold but the tickets weren’t released, the lady I spoke to put this through on the phone and within minutes I was able to see everything correctly on the BA website.

I can’t fault BA as the whole phone call took 8 minutes.