oneworld - Cathay CMB-related "other" cancellations?

On the phone with an agent from the dark side of the AA ATW desk - almost enough to break my policy of not playing favorites, and asking for a favorite agent...

But the real story is that Cathay (according to her, anyway) canceled my LAX-LHR (on AA) a couple of weeks ago, presumably while they were messing with my record to change HKG-CMB to HKG-BKK. (Actually 3 pax on 3 pnr's, two cancelled, one not. Wonder what that means?)

Nothing left on AA that day, so I asked for a BA flight. (The Aagent offered D on AA; fortunately I was sitting in front of my computer and brought up the schedule on EF showing BA with A3. Then when her computer went down a moment later, she blamed it on me for messing with the system!)

Next stumbling block was that rate desk wasn't about to allow the ticket (AA e-ticket) to end in BKK. "Go talk to Cathay"!) I convinced her to add BKK-CMB OPN and that seems to have made the rate desk semi happy. They're still having agony with the calcs, though. AAgent blames it on Cathay, of course - original paper ticket ex-CMB, re-issued by AA electronic a couple of months ago. "Not our fault." I explained that when AA re-issued it the first time, it became AA's ticket, and at least she went quiet.

Anyway, if this post is to serve as anything but a vent by me, the moral: check your bookings often! If I hadn't decided to add a couple of segments I'f have shown up at LAX next week to discover a disaster.

This happens to me for 2 or 3 segments each year -- so it is a chronic problem, and not limited to Oneworld or any specific computer systems. Some innocuous change is made by airline A (schedule change, etc. -- never a change in flight number or travel date, so no change at all in the context of the reservation), and an unrelated segment by airline B is canceled. Generally not adjacent segments, fwiw. Whenever I have pursued it the cause was never found (not in the audit trail, etc.). It seems some stray mis-formatted messages are sent off into the ether by airilne A, and B processes it as some priority over-ride notification (all random). So far there has never been a dispute that a change occured which should not have, but each time the onus was on the pax to find and fix it. This might become a bigger problem in the future with all those e-tickets flying about. I've been forced to create my own "paprer" e-ticket (printing out all of the details and having it with me at check-in -- needed far too often). In short, the system is starting to be unreliable.

Yup, if this is an indication, e-tickets look to be a major disaster. The airline computers that are still in the teletype ALL-CAPS world are not up to the challenge.

After the rate desk got past "we can't ticket if it doesn't end in CMB", they agonized for at least an hour over my reissue, which added DUB-MAD-IST-MAD-NCE to a vanilla AONE3 that was nothing more than CMB-HKG-LAX-SJO-LAX-LHR .. CDG-HKG-CMB. (I did get voicemail indicating that they'd toughed it out, but the desk is closed and I don't know if they've invented any suprises for me.)

CX had issued the ticket at CMB, and AA had reissued it when I added LAX-SJO-LAX. "Now that it's an e-ticket, changes will be a snap" said the agent at ONT who'd herself spent an hour on the phone issuing that change, supposedly all set up by the atw desk.

About a week ago I changed LHR-HKG to CDG-HKG. That was as pleasant as today's experience was painful. Then, the rate desk had no trouble with the BKK ending, nor with pricing (although since the total was just $125, they may not have given it much attention.) Today, AA's view of their e-ticket seemed to have turned to gibberish. At my suggestion that e-tickets were supposed to be a snap to deal with, the agent opined that that was very much not the case.

Besides the wise suggestion to keep an active paper trail of your e-tickets, I'd also like to suggest that calling the AA atw desk on weekends or after 4 PM indicates the caller is prone to a bit of masochism.

I wonder if I can sweet-talk AA into "original routing miles?" Probably not, since nothing was really their fault.

...Nothing left on AA that day, so I asked for a BA flight...
If on AAdvantage there's a nice FC segment (x3) out the window.

Besides the wise suggestion to keep an active paper trail of your e-tickets, I'd also like to suggest that calling the AA rate desk on weekends or after 4 PM indicates the caller is prone to a bit of masochism.


I can certainly attest to that. Due to time zone issues I only call at 7-8am US CT (11pm-ish AEST for me). So not a problem for me. ^ But yes I've tried the weekends before and the AAgents were not as a good as the ones you get weekday mornings. Also someone who I referred to the AA ATW desk called at 8am AEST on a weekday (which must be a while after 4pm US CT) and got a rather unhelpful AAgent.

If on AAdvantage there's a nice FC segment (x3) out the window.
Yes. I'll ask for the miles but since it wasn't their fault, I know the answer.

There's a thread over in AA in which posters assert that indeed, looking at one's flight information on aa.com locks the record so that the aagent can't access it, and may well lose changes s/he's made, forcing her to grumble very loudly and start over. Sad, and one more advantage the LCC's have.

OT, how obvious is one's Aadvantage status to the res agent? Well into our unfriendly booking process yesterday, Mrs. Bear fairly suddenly turned quite polite, as if she'd just noticed she was not doing her best for 3 explats. Or maybe her supervisor came into the room and sat down where she could monitor.

...OT, how obvious is one's Aadvantage status to the res agent?...
Once, when dealing with the vaunted AA ATW desk, an agent told me (paraphrasing here): "I can't tell if you are EXP or not, but it doesn't matter to us here anyway".

The rate desk did hand me a surprise - having traded a LHR-HKG premium segment (stopover) for CDG-HKG I was hoping to end up some gbp80 to the good (even though I know they never give back taxes), but instead was told I owed $184 more. I asked the atw person (a very pleasant one, but new to me) why, so she went off to query the rate desk. That kept me on hold for half an hour, after which she volunteered to call back.

A couple of hours later she came back with fees of only $53, and that's today's lesson. The rate desk(s) clearly are not equipped to pontificate about ONE ticket prices, even though that's their job, so if taxes seem too high and the difference matters to you (and you have the time), challenge them on it.

The "drivel" part is that my AA e-ticket has turned back to paper. I personally prefer that, but the reason is amusing: CMB can't handle e-tickets. No matter that I will never arrive there bacause CX has no service; no matter that, even should I get there, CMB will never see the ticket as it will have expired. There is most definitely a circus somewhere that's missing its clowns.

The exciting part is that I drove out to Ontario expecting to waste the afternoon watching the agent try to coax my tickets out of her machine, but this time it took all of a minute.

ONT is a great place to re-issue if only because AA doesn't actually appear to fly there, so you can find one or two agents standing at the counter wondering how long it'll be before the company notices and stops paying them. One invited me to her counter; I gave my usual "you'll be sorry" and told her what she'd gotten herself into. "I'm already sorry," she agreed. So we were both amazed that just a few keyclicks and the job was done, and had a jolly time dancing around the terminal together.

... and had a jolly time dancing around the terminal together.:confused:
The images that invokes! :eek:

:D