Several weeks ago I booked a typical round trip from Chicago to New York. Well, the trip was standard enough. I wanted an extra stop so I ended up booking flights from Chicago to New York, to DC, and back to Chicago. While the routing might not have been typical the process of booking was. To book I simply searched the flights on Google Flights and clicked through to American’s website.
When booked I filled in my personal information which included adding my AAdvantage number to the reservation. A few minutes after paying for the flights the trip showed up in my American Airlines app and on the website.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because, surprisingly, there was an issue after I completed the trip. The issue was that I didn’t initially receive credit for one of the flights. This was quite confusing and I’m surprised that I even noticed, but it served as a reminder why it’s important to double-check that you receive credit on all flights. The experience also served as a reminder of how to request mileage credit for missing flights.
I Didn’t Receive Credit For One Segment Of The Trip
Before I ever take a trip with American or a partner airline I always check my current Elite Qualification.
I do this because over the years I’ve learned that for one reason or another flights sometimes just don’t credit properly. Typically this only happens with partner airlines, but I have had it happen with American operated flights.
So, before I set off for New York I checked my Elite Qualification and noticed that YTD I had completed 29 segments. With the trip I had planned I would end up at 32 segments (as seen above). I usually also have a rough estimate of how many EQD and EQM I should earn with each trip, but I often ignore those metrics on short domestic trips such as this one.
Shortly after completing my trip to New York one EQS posted which brought my YTD total to 30 flights. About 12 hours later another flight posted bringing my total to 31 flights. Then, about a day later I checked again and nothing changed. This was surprising because I would expect all flights to post within about 48 hours of completing a journey. It was also surprising because at that point only my NYC to DCA to ORD flights had posted. For some reason the first flight, from Chicago to New York was missing.
When I clicked on the “My Activity” page I found the following.
As you can see, the first leg to New York is missing.
Requesting Missing Mileage Accrual From American Airlines
As it had been a little over a week since completing my journey I decided to take action as the flight was clearly missing. Generally, American flights post within a week while some partners may take up to 10-14 days!
After the week of waiting I decided to reach out to American for a missing mileage credit. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is to visit American’s Request Flight Miles page. On this page you simply have to enter your AAdvantage account number and ticket number to request credit for your flight.
Shortly after you submit each claim you will receive an email confirming that your request is received. From there the miles, if applicable, should post to your account a few days later. Keep in mind you can also do this up to a year following a flight if you should forget to add a frequent flyer account number to a reservation, but I digress.
When requesting my missing mileage credit I didn’t have easy access to my ticket number so I decided to try another method. With this request I decided to reach out to American Airlines on Twitter to request the missing mileage credit.
Requesting Missing Flight Credits From American’s Twitter Team
I began the dialog by tweeting at American to see if it is possible to request missing flight credits over twitter.
A few moments later, as with most tweets to American, I received the following response.
After receiving that response I found my trips record locator and set it to the American Airlines Twitter team over Direct Message (DM). In case you didn’t know, it often goes down in the DMs I’ve heard.
Sure enough American confirmed what I was seeing on my end and let me know that they were working on correcting the mistake. No more than a few hours later the missing flight finally appeared in my AAdvantage account.
While the missing miles weren’t incredibly significant, when trying to once again qualify for Executive Platinum every mile counts.
Final Thoughts
In the past three years I’ve taken roughly 150 American operated flights and this is the first time a single segment has failed to post. Clearly something like this happening is quite rare and thankfully quite easy to correct. However, situations like this remind me of why it’s important to always verify that you’re getting credit for each and ever flight you take. You never know when one of these flights will fail to post and you’ll end up missing out on valuable miles.
Also, this situation once again reminded me of how helpful American’s Twitter team is. Over the past year I’ve moved all of my customer service interaction with American to Twitter. I like using Twitter because it allows me to passively work through an issue. I don’t want to sit on the phone with a customer service rep while they investigate something like this. Instead, I just want to send a tweet and wait for a reply. Thankfully, from my experience, most issues that come up can be solved over twitter.
For what it’s worth I’ve also been able to get a flight rebooked over twitter. However, that is one situation where I do actually like talking to someone over the phone.
