How do I prevent the following from happening again???
I had a confirmed business class e-ticket (DONE04 ex-CAI) issued by American Airlines. When I arrived at Auckland airport 2-1/2 hours before departure, LAN reps were unable to issue boarding passes. (The reps were in Air New Zealand livery). The supervisor was very unhelpful. She couldn’t get through to LAN, and had no phone access for me to call AA RTW or EXP desks in US. The problem had something to do with the segments marked “E” for "exchanged" rather than “A” for “airport control”. I was standing there for over 2-hours! I could tell this was going nowhere. I figured they weren’t going to board me and my 7-segment mileage run would fall apart. I finally ran over to the Qantas desk (even though they had nothing to do with the ticket) and enlisted their aid. I had to call American Airlines RTW in the USA at my expense to attempt to resolve the issue. From what I can gather, AA had “screwed up” the ticket & it had to be reissued. I had to rush to the gate at the last minute with an escort as I was closed out due to the late hour. I noticed they had given me an economy seat. I appealed to the gate agent and finally was placed in business class. However, my luggage is now lost. I noticed that when the supervisor, Rose, tagged my bag, she put 2 separate luggage tags on: AKL-SYD & SYD-AKL (I was doing a turn-around), rather than 1-tag AKL-SYD-AKL.
This was for LAN 801 AKL-SYD 5:55am on 20-3-2010. A weekend. Thank God it was Friday night in US. If RTW was closed I would have been stuck in Auckland. Try to get another OW carrier to work on these tickets!: JAL can only see their flights, etc.