Originally Posted by
ThreeJulietTango
^ Neither AA.com nor Reservations can sell a ticket for flights departing within 2 hours because the tickets may not be issued prior to the check-in cutoff time. The process can be manually expedited with a phone call to eTDS, but it's time-consuming and AA's solution seems to be to simply prevent the sales from happening altogether.
Considering that US Airways offers instant ticketing, I would hope that this functionality is somehow incorporated once we reach a single reservations system.
With the US flights merging in AA's systems, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for that one.
Being used to instant ticketing on US, this particular point feels like stepping back several decades in time. There are times I have spent very significant dollars on close in flights on US en route to the airport while in a taxi to the airport due to the a client emergency - I keep a separate suitcase in my office for this exact reason, and need it at least a half dozen times per year. The thought that the flights might not be ticketed in time without significant manual intervention in 2015 kind of blows my mind.