Traveler Question: How do I find my OneWorld Record Locator using my American Airlines Record Locator?

I won’t be the first blogger to share this tip with you but it’s information that a lot of travelers are on the search for. For frequent American Airlines flyers like myself, I’m often booked into codeshare flights onto other OneWorld carriers’ flights, with or without AA flight numbers . This includes British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Qantas, and Royal Jordanian. Airlines may reference these as various terms: Record Locator. Booking Reference. Booking Confirmation Number. 

American Airlines uses strictly alphabetic characters in their record locator (example: TUAFLY). Most other OneWorld carriers use both alphabetic and numeric characters in their record locators (example: Y9PL7G). When you are attempting to manage your booking or make seat selections, you’ll find that using your American Airlines won’t be useful in locating your reservation.

For example’s sake, let’s say you booked a codeshare flight on British Airways through American Airlines and you have an American Airlines record locator (booking confirmation) number. You could go the people route and call British Airways or American Airlines. If you have status and have access to a dedicated elite phone line, this call could be quick. Or very long if you are calling the standard Reservations line. Most often, I prefer just to get information quickly online if it can be obtained on my own.

The best tool in my view is to use the Qantas website to convert your AA record locator to your BA record locator. Each airline has different terminology and Qantas refers to their record locators as “Booking Reference #”. Here are the quick steps to follow to do this:

1. Go to Qantas.com
2. From the Qantas.com home page’s top menu, click on “Book” and the “Manage My Booking“
3. On the left hand side, there is a grey and white box to titled “Your Flight Booking” where you will enter your American Airlines record locator and the passenger’s last name. Type these in and hit “Go”
4. As long as the information entered is accurate, this should take you the “Manage Your Booking” page with a number of options to manage your booking. Your booking locator will be at the very top as “Booking Reference #XXXXXX”. Depending on your booking class, elite status, and time until departure, you may be able make seat selections on a number of OneWorld airlines.
5. All done! You can now save this additional booking reference (aka. record locator, booking confirmation number) and take it to other carrier websites like British Airways and Finnair to manage your booking on their native website.

Hope this tip comes in handy for you. I know it was a nice time saver for me on a recent British Airways booking!

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