Grass is Often Not Greener Even as AA Exec Plat But President of Fidelity?
Back in "the day," the legacy airlines really did offer an advantage, they could pretty much endorse your ticket over to any other flying carrier by:
1. In the good old ays of paper tickets the agent would just scribble the new airline and flight# on your paper ticket coupon;'
2. Sometimes they would write a handwritten FIM flight interruption manifest to put you on another carrier;
3. More recently airlines could push control of electronic ticket coupons to other carriers that they wanted to use to reaccommodate on.
However, in the last 2 years, airlines have broken up in terms of interline ticketing agreements which facilitate these reaccommodations:
1. The most famous was the break up of DL and AA; initiated by DL. Now AA cannot protect its passengers on DL and vice versa; and
2. While it didn't get as much press, my understanding is that AA and B6 broke off a similar agreement, so each carrier can no longer protect on the other.
This past winter I was stuck in BOS flying to DCA, and even as an AA Exec Platinum AA Admirals Club member, they could not put me on a B6 flight using my AA ticket. They could have still put me on UA but not B6.
Also keep in mind I think airlines have special procedures say if there was anb aviation accident, then I think all rules are thrown out, and they have a way of putting an affected pax or family member on any airline no matter what! I don't know at that point if they just write a FIM or the Care Team uses a corporate credit card to buy whatever ticket is needed; or if the airlines have some sort of agreement they fall back on in the case of a dire emergency like a plane crash or say if Boston fell in to the drink!
I just bring this up because lets say even though AA and B6 don't typically now endorse tickets to each other, I wonder if a shift manager, supervisor, station manager, etc. has a special way they can use in limited circumstances to reaccommodate passengers on an airline even though the carriers ttypically don't do that.
You or I would likely not be so lucky as to find someone with both the authority and the know how of how to do this, but I wonder, say if an AA Concierge Key (like UA Global Services) member was stuck, if those agents who again handle AA's top revenue contributors have a way to force the system say to accommodate a Concierge Key member on JetBlue even though that is typically something that is no longer done?
Similarly lets say the president of Fidelity was flying B6 and they controlled a huge Mint contract out of BOS and JFK, I wonder if secret agents at B6 would have a way of accommodating the president of fidelity on AA even though B6 typically does not accommodate on AA?