I just spent 45 minutes on the phone with an AA agent trying to get what should be a very simple schedule change completed.

I have an itin later this year - MCI-MIA-CLT-BCN. The first two segments were scheduled for AA metal, the CLT-BCN segment for US metal. It is a simple standalone one-way coach award.

However, the CLT-BCN flight was recently changed to be two hours earlier, creating a misconnect with the MIA-CLT flight.

To make matters worse, the records in both AA.com and USAirways.com make no sense now: I can't view anything in AA.com and what I see in USAirways.com is MCI-MIA-CLT as an "outbound" and MIA-CLT-BCN as an "inbound", with my MIA-CLT flight incorrectly showing 30 minutes in duration. (Yes, MIA-CLT is inexplicably duplicated. )

Since the ticket was issued by AA using AA miles in December, I called AA.

The first 10 minutes of the conversation were explaining that it's a schedule change and therefore I didn't need the agent to go off looking for award availability. I could tell the agent was reading some instructional files and eventually agreed that in my case, yes, I was entitled to a change and did not need to find award seats. I was mildly annoyed because I started the conversation clearing talking about a schedule change and a misconnect, not my desire to voluntarily change an award.

The middle 15 minutes was a long hold with her apparently talking to another department who came back and said that they could only change AA flights since it was an AA schedule change. They couldn't "open up" US flights. I explained that the BCN flight was a US flight, and the agent said "Oh, they were fixated on the MCI-MIA flight...that one also had a schedule change." (It did, of a few minutes, but that was immaterial to me.)

Finally, she agreed that I should be placed on a nonstop MCI-CLT flight on US that would leave a 2:45 connection in CLT. She tried finding someone who could do that (another 10 minutes), but finally came back and said "I have to put it in a queue for US, and they'll ticket it next week." The rest of the time was her completing some form to send the request to a queue in US-land.

I'm not too worried (yet): the MCI-CLT flight won't fill up in 4-5 days, and it has 50+ seats available. But shouldn't this be a *little* easier? Would it have been any benefit to phone a US number first? I thought AA miles -> AA ticket -> AA Gold telephone support would work.