James Cridland

Managing your American Airlines flight from a Qantas booking's PNR

A cluster of American Airlines planes in LAX

After doing a bit of searching on the internet, I gave up, and posted on a forum…

I’ve just booked a flight on QF’s website that includes one sector on a non codeshare AA flight (LHR to LAX).

Is there a simple way to find out my AA PNR, so I can go and choose a seat? It’s a 12 hour flight, so I’d quite like to ensure I don’t have a middle seat, that would be no good.

The answer is rather counter-intuitively…

  • Visit the British Airways website (no, really) and use “Manage my booking”. Use your Qantas PNR and surname.
  • Choose your AA flight
  • Click “Choose Seat”
  • Your flights will appear. Your AA flight will have a “Choose seats” link. Click that.
  • That page will show you both the “BA booking reference”, which is actually your Qantas one, and the “American booking reference”.
  • Visit American’s website, and use this American booking reference to get in.

(For the last step, don’t follow the link BA will give you, it’ll probably break).

There, that was easy enough once you know how.

Obviously, Qantas ought to publish, somewhere, the AA PNR as well as the QF one… but still, there we are.

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