Most of us at one point or another have used miles to fly on partner airlines within the same alliance. One of my favorite redemptions include using my British Airways Avios for American Airlines flights (because they follow a distance-based award chart, often making it “cheaper” in miles to fly domestically).
When you book with miles of a particular airline, your reservation generates a 6-character record locator that is specific to that airline itself. Â The partner airline that you’re ticketed on has its own unique record locator that is tied to your ticket that could be used to access your reservation on the airline you’re flying to change seats, have your ticket recognize your elite status etc.
Up until recently, I found it easy to just tweet the airline that I was flying, asking if they could provide me the airline-specific record locator using my ticket number. In my experience, I would receive a response back in minutes.
I must have been living under a rock because my friend Jamison pointed me to an easier way: checkmytrip.com (for reservations from airlines using the Amadues reservation system).
With Check My Trip, all you have to do is simply input your record locator, and it will display the partner record locator (in my example below, the record locator on the top right is my British Airways one, the associated American Airlines one is all the way at the bottom).
=Just thought I’d pass along my recent finding… have you used Check My Trip before?
Great tip, thanks! I always found it annoying that when using Avios for Aer Lingus, it was a crap shoot whether I would ever get the Aer Lingus booking reference #
You weren’t the only one living under a rock. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the suggestion; however, it did not work for me in 2019. I booked with American Airlines mile and itinerary which included an Alaska Airlines flight. I think that checkmytrip.com has changed quite a bit since you published this article 4 years ago.
Firstly, I had to sign-up for an account to even attempt what you tried. Then after I added my booking (which I could only do through email, perhaps because it was so new); they only showed me my American Airlines record locator, even for my Alaska Air flight. I do wonder if this was because the booking was only an hour or so since ticketing.
Nevertheless, I called up AA and they gave me my Alaska record locator (and selected my seats for me freely and willingly). By the way, recently British Airways wouldn’t select my seats on an AA flight I booked with then without charging me a steep service fee.
This is a great tip! I tried to get the AA record locator of a Qantas booked trip. I called American Airlines and they were useless. I called AMEX and they didnt have it but offered to call Qantas which was CLOSED for two more hours. I decided to search the web and your trip gave me the number in a minute. How strange that AMEX and AA cant provide it yet this site does.
Thank you!