rabble

Hey folks,

I've searched but couldn't find this addressed. My better half has a fellowship for a year in Buenos Aires for basically all of 2014. That means we're moving from PDX down to BUE. We'll be traveling a bunch during the year, but ideally we'd buy trip down around the 1st of January 2014, and returning January 1st 2015, more or less.

The thing is AA and most of the travel sites won't let me book a ticket over 330 days in advance. I'd strongly prefer to go on AA since i've got SWU's to burn between now and Feb 28th. I found a fare on LAN to MVD (find since we've got reasons to visit uruguay). But nothing but United to Buenos Aires.

How does one get a ticket with American when you've got this kind of situation? We could use miles one way, but the fellowship's paying for tickets, and buying two sets of one way tickets is very expensive. So is changing the dates on the return.

Ideas?

Feel free to merge this in to a thread where the issue of how to get return tickets more than 330 days out is addressed, I just couldn't find it.

regards,
r

ijgordon

Well, you could buy a ticket with the return segment < 330 days (since you need to have a reservation in order to issue a ticket), and then just change the ticket when availability opens up for the return that you want. But you may run into the problem that tickets are only valid for one year from the date they are issued. I don't think you can do 1/1/14-1/1/15 without doing two one-ways. You can shorten the trip by a day or two, but that still means you can't purchase your ticket until right before departure, which will likely be very expensive.

Dave Noble

You need to have the return flight within 1 year of departure

You may need to just book as far in future as you can and then call and change the return date once it is bookable. If there are any change fees , then you will have to pay those. You may want to look and see what one fares are offered on the routes and see whether it may be better value to purchase one ways on the best priced carrier

Dave Noble

Of course you can, the validity of a 1 year ticket is 1 year from date of outward travel

ijgordon

Right, my bad, I was misinterpreting the fare rules.

hillrider

Uses phone reservations and hopes that the person who one gets connected to either has the training or knows how to access the resources to execute it. One may have to ask for a supervisor and/or use the hang-up and redial trick if said person doesn't seem to be particularly knowledgeable or helpful.

hillrider

Correct. International rule 165 readsplus language saying, in effect, that some fares may have rules that restrict a ticket validity differently.

Herb687

Many round trip fares have a 30 day maximum stay restriction.

Dave Noble

There are many different limits that may exist on fares, 30 days being one of them; assuming that the OP purchases one which permits stay of 1 year, then will not be an issue

Looking at fares to EZE ( from PDX ) , none has anything less than a 1 year validity for maximum stay though many have minimum stay requirements

UAE777

I have had exactly the same issue in May this year as I needed to book a TATL leaving for the US in August and planning to come back in June 2014. This wasn't possible as no dates in June were available for booking yet...so I ended up calling AA and was surprised by their generous policy.

Here is a quick summary of what they told me - and yes, it worked:

1) Book flight on aa.com and pick a preliminary departure date for the return flight that is close to the latest date currently available for booking

2) Call AA and advise them that you could not book your desired return date as it is not available for booking yet. They will add a note to your reservation.

3) Once your desired return date is available for booking (just check aa.com) call AA again and ask them to change your booking.

In this situation AA will give you a one-time waiver for the ticket change fee and as long as there is availability in the same fare bucket as your original booking you will not incur any additional cost.
However, you would need to pay any fare differences if, for example, you originally booked an N-bucket ticket, but there is only L-bucket availability.
Expertflyer will help you keep track of that.

Personally, I really found this to be very generous of AA and did not find any other US or European carrier offering this.

I hope this helps for your planning.

rabble

It worked! Thanks UAE777! I was able to call up the exec platinum desk and they had to talk to various folks to make it happen, but they said they'd let me change fares waving the fare change fee for the tickets. Thanks to everybody on flyertalk for helping figure this out.