We were so excited. Kristian and I had been saving American Airlines (AA) miles for months – almost a year – to be able to go overseas and film again this spring. This week we finally had (almost) enough miles to redeem them and book round-trip tickets to Europe.

We went online to buy our tickets.

Imagine our surprise when reserving tickets to France and Switzerland resulted in almost $500 in airline fees!?!

We panicked.

This couldn’t be. Was this whole airline miles thing too good to be? We started pricing routes to different cities and coming up with all sorts of different fee amounts. This was getting ridiculous.

And then we found it – the source of huge fees – in one little checked box.

What we found about redeeming American Airlines miles

It turns that when you redeem American Airlines miles for an overseas flight, any codeshare (shared) flight on British Airways will add a huge fuel surcharge. (Sometimes airlines have partnerships with other airlines. You can book with American, but still fly a leg of the flight on another airline they have an agreement with, such as British Airways.)

So all we had to do was to find the journey with the least number of British Airways flights.

We unchecked the British Airways flight box, and the only flights that were left were ones without that fuel surcharge. That worked on the flights from the US to Paris. Our flight fee there went from $300 to….wait for it…$5! (sound of angels singing).

On the flights back, we unchecked the box and got no results. So we went through the list of available flights and found a flight with only one leg of the trip on British Airways. This brought the cost down quite a bit.

The entire round trip will cost us around $150 in fees now. And to think we almost booked for $500 in fees 😮 Yikes!

Tips to Save in Fees Flying to Europe with American Airlines Miles

• Try your initial journey without British Airways flights
• Look at nearby airport options. For instance, London and Paris both have airports, and they may have different codeshare flights available.
• Keep checking back for flights to open up – there were few options when we checked on Friday, but several better opened up the next day. We saved $100 just from that.
• If you have an American Airlines credit card such as Citi AAdvantage, ask an AA sales support rep about reduced mileage award. You sometimes get a mileage discount or this. (You will have to book over the phone when you redeem miles and pay an extra fee, but you can save thousands of miles). We were flying in shoulder season instead of off-season, so this was not available.

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See our other tips for booking cheap flights to Europe