mardigras

Can someone give me some advice on how to escalate this issue?

I booked an AA reward ticket within 3 weeks of travel, and paid the extortion $75 late booking fee. However, my flight was canceled due to impending Hurricane Ike. I was unable to rebook a departure for many days and therefore canceled the trip altogether.

I understand that the $75 is 'not refundable' under normal circumstances, but it seems there should be a caveat for flights that AA chooses to cancel. All of the other majors waited until later in the afternoon before canceling their flights. The airport remained open and operating for hours after my flight was scheduled to depart.

What's particularly irritating, is this is a fee for a service that has absolutely no actual cost to AA. Baggage Fees make sense to me, since they represent an actual cost to the airline. And charge me for the awful turkey sandwich should I be desperate enough to eat it. But this is just an example of the airline figuring out a way to stick it to you and devalue the miles I earned before there was such a fee (yes, that long ago).

I have been bounced from Advantage reservations to Advantage Customer Service like a ping pong ball. An email from Advantage Customer Service contained the boilerplate 'the $75 is non-refundable' answer. My request to escalate the issue was ignored.

Does anyone have a suggestion of what I can do to try to escalate this? Thank you.