joeypore

I suppose I'll chime back in now that other people are in on the discussion.

Lol. AA paying for something that they don't need to.......haha... Oh yeah, they're a US based airline. Of course they wouldn't!

To the guy that's relentlessly arguing that we are in the wrong, would it really kill you to consider that your limited knowledge (non-omniscience) could be incomplete? Not a personal attack by any means, but given the evidence and examples at hand... Maybe instead of acting like you wrote the law..... (Monkey covering his mouth emoji)

All in good jest.

I think it's safe to say none of us here represent the people who govern/enforce this in the UK, so we could all be wrong to some extent, and probably are missing something.

I did a bit of digging, however, and while not the exact situation, the exemption of taxes from a connection of less than 24 hours, but regarding two separate PNRs / itineraries is apparently a very common practice in the world of employee travel. For leisure, that is.

Airline employees, as I have read, are responsible for the exact same taxes as revenue pax are on flights originating in London, including the premium cabin taxes should they be seated as such; however, if they present an incoming boarding pass that shows their arrival into the country within 24 hours of the scheduled departure time, they are exempt from the taxes. Regardless of the airline, type of ticket, etc. it just has to be a ticket of completed travel that shows the scheduled time of arrival into the country.

I don't know the specifics of how it is documented, of course, but this would explain why the AA agents in LHR are quite aware of this practice, as I assume many employees use LHR as an onward hub to Europe noting the amount of flights that fly into LHR (also lack of flights to other cities on AA metal), and equally why many phone agents /other agents that don't deal with this regularly would be out of the loop regarding the same issue.

Just some food for thought.