Well something strange happened. In March, partner carrier LAN had a schedule change that impacted a couple of their flights. The flight times only changed a little bit. For my father-in-law’s ticket, everything was normal with the new flights noted. However, my mother-in-law’s ticket fell apart. Unbeknownst to me, American had forgotten to debit my AAdvantage account for the miles required nor charge my credit card for the taxes and fees for her award ticket. Thus when the schedule change occurred, none of the LAN segments came back as confirmed. Even though I had e-mails from American showing this itinerary as ticketed. And American did not communicate this drop of segments to me nor her. I found out by randomly checking her record locator on their site this weekend. And this was totally independent of American’s massive system failure yesterday.

I called American to try to get her original segments back. The first agent said points were never deducted for this ticket and that there was nothing they could do. If LAN did not have award availability for these seats, then she would have to pick a different date or time to fly. This was obviously unacceptable considering I had ticketing confirmation from American, and her husband was flying at these already set dates and times.