Recent Experience booking airline tickets

[lovestx]

While planning our October 2019 trip, I read as much as I could about booking our airline tickets given that Air Tahiti Nui does not easily let you select seats when purchasing through a partner airline.  I just booked my tickets last night and thought I would record what worked for me so that others have the information going forward.

 

We booked our flights independently as we are Platinum members on American Airlines AND we had $2000 in transportation vouchers from American that we needed to use.  We wanted to book Premium Economy for the LAX to PPT/PPT to LAX legs but they were only available  on the return trip.  I didn't want to purchase the PE tickets on the return until I could be sure that we could get seats together and that they weren't the last row of PE and didn't have a big recline.

 

I booked the flights and class I wanted on AA.com.  I put the tickets on HOLD (as American allows you to do) for 24 hours.  The next day, I called Air Tahiti Nui during their business hours and asked about seat availability on those flights.  The agent was very helpful and was able to book seats for me that I liked for each leg of the ATN trip.  She told me it would be much easier for her to do so if I selected flights on AA and put them on HOLD...which I had already done.  After I selected my seats, she gave me the record locator would be using to manage my flight which was different from the one that AA used.  Also note that the ATN agent told me that she could not book my trip herself as the ATN site does not quote the correct pricing for flight itineraries that have different classes in them.

 

I then called AA to use the vouchers to purchase the tickets.  Most of you won't need to do this.  Had I not had vouchers, I would have simply gone to AA.com and purchased my tickets.  I could already see all of the seat assignments.

 

Hope this is helpful.