Hello,

I'm wondering if any AA experts on this forum can assist with something. In March of 2014, I booked a December 26th flight to St. Thomas. As fate would have it, I soon found out that my wife was pregnant and we were due to fly on her due date. Obviously, I cancelled the trip.

When I got around to calling, AA placed a refund of about $750 per ticket (after their $200 fee) directly on my e-ticket. There was no voucher issued, they said to just place an itinerary on hold and then call to transfer the e-ticket to the new itinerary. To my surprise, the funds were only good for flights departing one year from the date that I booked, not from the date of travel.

Since we have a newborn baby, we are not interested in going anywhere in the next couple months. The earliest would be April or May. So I was wondering if there is any way to extend this credit. An AA agent offered the idea of booking a cheap refundable flight before my expiry date, and then cancelling it. He thought this would extend it, but was not confident at all. Can anyone comment on this, or have any other ideas?

I did not explore the idea of asking for a refund based on a birth of a child, is this anything that ever happens? I don't really want to spend hours going back and forth with AA on this one (my hold times were unreal every time I called in about this trip) so I would rather just use the credit up and pay the fee unless the process for triggering one of these refunds is really simple.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!