sinanju

Here's how my Monday afternoon with AA went:

• 12pm My company's travel agent's rate desk calls me with a price on an itinerary starting with a BOS-LHR sector followed by a bunch of flights inside Europe and ending with a LHR-BOS sector. For optimal pricing, the itinerary is on 5 tickets. All tickets are e-tickets. I tell them to make the purchase. A few minutes later I see the status of the reservation change on AA.com from unknown to ticketed, so I call the EXP desk to upgrade from J to A. There's plenty of inventory and I'm told, "No Problem"
  
• 1pm "There's a problem." Since I'm always flying in J, I've never been out of pocket for the UK luxury tax on upgrades to A -- it's already part of the J seat. In this case, though, even though I'm transiting through LHR, and therefore exempt from the tax, BOS-LHR and LHR-BOS is one ticket and my inbound flight, MXP-LHR, is on another. AA won't issue the upgrade unless I pay the tax. I'm familliar with the law, but not the specifics at this point, so I call my TA to find out if the tax should have been paid. I'm told, "No. We simply note your exemption on the LHR-BOS ticket with a reference to the other." I call back AA and ask if they could do the upgrade without the tax if I gave them the ticket number for the inbound flight. I'm told, "Yes, but it will take a while. I'll call you back."
  
• 3pm No call back, but I see the reservation on AA.com now has BOS-LHR-BOS in first, so I pick seats.
  
• 6pm Still no call back, but an itch at the back of my brain tells me to check the reservation again, so I head to AA.com. At first, it appears BOS-LHR was missing from my reservation, but I found it, listed out of chronological order a bit further down. I also found it with a business class seat assignment. LHR-BOS was also in business. So, I call the EXP desk again and I'm told, "Your TA called, requested your upgrade, and also requested your ticket be reissued as paper." I assure the agent that my TA has no idea that I have status, does not do my upgrade requests for me and, in fact, doesn't even plan my itineraries -- I do that myself. I'm assured that, in fact, the TA requested paper: "It's right here, as plain as day." I'm also told that I'm in first, but I can't see it on AA.com because it's now a paper ticket. I'm also told I can't get a seat assignment for the same reason.
  
  So, I call the TA and, as I suspected, they did no such thing. I tell them that I'm tired of being the moderator of the TA/AA conversation and ask for a conference call. I provide the TA with the EXP desk phone number and my AAdvantage number and I'm put on hold for a few minutes. The TA comes back and says, "I think we know what's going on, but this is going to take a while." *sigh*. "I'll call you back."
  
• Just before midnight The TA calls back... "It's fixed, but you're getting a paper ticket for BOS-LHR-BOS." The TA gives me the name of the EXP desk agent. I call that agent and I'm told that, when issuing the upgrade an "inexperience EXP agent (we're hiring a lot of new ones these days) applied the upgrade. Then, when reissuing the ticket, did it as paper. In the process of doing that, the upgrades dropped." While we were talking, I was looking at the reservation on AA.com and, although it is still out of chronological order, I do have seats in first again, so I pick seats -- so much for "it's paper so you can't pick seats or see it on AA.com." Perhaps another recent hire.
  
  I thank her for her time and hang up... just as Monday turns into Tuesday.

There really has to be a better way.

bdemaria

You chose - based on your travel agent's advice - back to back ticketing to save some money and it complicated your itinerary. How is that AAs fault?

sinanju

Well, my company requires that I take the TA's pricing and ticketing arrangements. And, I have no trouble with AA's handling of my situation between the hours of 12pm and 3pm in my story. They had legitimate questions, I did some homework, then provided them the answers they required. That said:

• Once I supplied the ticket number for the inbound flight, I was told that I would be called with any further questions, or to be informed the upgrade was complete. I was not called.
• An agent insisted the TA caused the paper-ticket issue when they had not. "Plain as day" is a direct quote. That agent also insisted that I was in first and could not see it on aa.com because the ticket was paper. Both of those "plain as day" claims were false -- I was, in fact, not in first at that point.
• The agent who issued the paper tickets should not have and, even if they did, they were doing so in benefit of handing a VIP request and failed at that.

How are those things not AA's fault?

brp

Oh well. Maybe the next trip will go better.

Cheers.

sinanju

Well, I now have name of the person who actually took the time to figure out what was going wrong and put it right. In addtion to composing a nice letter to AA about her, I plan to ask for her, specifically, in the future.

So, yes, one can hope.

brp

That is a brilliant plan, and one of the true advantages of EXP- one can have a list (usually short) of go-to AAgents and request them by name for anything that is at all "interesting." I've done this with more complex dealings and it's great to know that you're talking with someone who's got game.

Cheers.

drtravels372

If that's your terrible experience, I would think you are a pretty lucky person. Mistakes happen, it got fixed. Move on.

sinanju

Where did I say it was terrible? I've had terrible experiences with airlines and this wasn't one of them. The word I used was "trouble".

It wasn't "terrible" -- in fact, the very nice and clueful agent I spoke to last offered me a $50 voucher for my "trouble", which I declined.

Thanks for your valuable insight, though.

DillMan

Sorry to agree with everyone else, but I too fail to see anything worthy of being upset about here. Your TA / your choice (you indicate the former) caused a touch of complexity and there were some miscommunications and a lack of follow up. A touch annoying? Yes. IMHO is it enough to be worth noting? No.

During the meltdown the week before last I was moved from flight to flight 3 times at DFW until I finally left around midnight. Once airborne, our plane depressurized and we were forced to (1) fly for a couple hours to burn fuel and then (2) land. When I showed up the next day to try again, the computer showed me as having used the ticket the previous night and therefore wouldn't issue by BP for the new flight that morning. Did I enjoy standing there almost an hour to sort this out and then have to sprint to the gate knowing that if I missed that flight my chances of getting another seat (especially in F) were slim? No, no and no. Did the thought of complaining or discussing the matter further occur to me? No.

In all honesty EXPs have it so much better than the rest of the world that on the rare occasion a human error or computer issue hangs us up for a few minutes or hours, we get see what the rest of the world gets to deal with virtually every time they have to sort anything out with the airline.

BTW, my story above had me at my destination the next afternoon. Due to the backlog of people at DFW, someone I know on the same flight ended up flying out 72 hours later. I would MUCH rather deal with a broken ticket than sit around for almost 3 days waiting for a flight. YMMV

eireman

The one thing in all this I don't understand is the apparent waiver of the luxury tax at LHR. Do you get a waiver??

I thought the rule was that the flight into LHR and the one ex LHR HAD to be on the same connecting tix to get this waived, it was not possible to simply link the PNR's of different tiz Has this changed??.

I do it ex DUb via LHr and now I have to limit myself to less than 24 hours in london if I want to spend time there to avoid the tax.

sinanju

I'm sorry. I must have missed the the rule about only sharing experiences for the potential benefit of others when those experiences reach the level of the MD-80 debacle. Also, I never said I was upset. I was a bit exasperated. Were I upset, I would have accepted compensation.

In the end, the upgrade was applied and I did not pay the tax. When I called AA back with my TA's explanation for how they cross-reference tickets for the waiver, that agent spoke to her own rate desk and was told that it would be possible for AA to apply the upgrade and reissue the ticket with the same cross-reference.

nbevan

Maybe I got the same inexperienced agent. Called the EXP desk (US) for an eVIP upgrade, and after a long hold, was told by the agent: "I have been fighting with the computer, but the computer has been winning! It says you need to visit the airport to pick up the ticket".

On aa.com, my reservation status is now "Unknown"!

nbevan

Avoiding the tax is a major achievement. ^

I would really like to know how to do this. Clearly not a matter of combining the PNRs (I have been told in the past that that can't be done without repricing).

Maybe paper ticketing means that they could meet the UK requirement that:

If so, paper tickets that can be combined or cross-referenced may be the thing to ask for in future to avoid the tax when connecting through UK on separate tickets.

sinanju

The TA seemed to to have accomplished (b) with nothing but e-tickets.

nbevan

Maybe purchasing the tickets through a TA made a difference?

But what we need to ask for when the upgrade is applied is for the tickets to be reissued with the same cross-reference?