Originally Posted by
JumboD
This is probably, unfortunately, dead on
. It's not worth a letter to the DOT, etc as this is really just about AA taking a minor annoyance and making it worse.
What they need to understand about me is this: Flying J is a necessity, flying F is a luxury. Now that I don't worry so much about buying Y and upgrading to J and instead base my travel partly on buying J and upgrading to F (transoceanic flights) the commitment to a given frequent flyer program doesn't have to be nearly what it was a few years ago. Not happy with buying AA J and upgrading to F? I can always just buy VS J and try something else entirely. Will I bail over this? No, that would be almost as silly as them throwing the rules in my face when all I wanted were some miles, but I don't consider myself nearly as tied down (especially since I'll hit 1mm this summer and always have the ability to get exit rows and request upgrades on discount tix for domestic travel).
Update: Today I got an email from AA saying they were sorry I was not satisfied with their response, but were still not going to "accept my claim". However, they said that in order to keep me flying AA they were giving me 6k miles.
That's all I'd really wanted in general (hey, that's 3/4 of a cent per mile), so I'm very happy with the result.
Something tells me that they were technically denying my claim but giving me miles "to keep my business" because then they don't have to report this in their baggage handling stats to DOT. However it doesn't really matter to me, I got what I actually wanted anyways (now under 50k to go to 1mm
).