Originally Posted by
lloydbishop
Hi,
Flew DFW-LHR return a couple of weeks ago. Outbound was Economy, return Premium Economy (paid). Called AA after booking and asked for SWUs on both legs, which were applied and showed in my record.
Got the SWU on the DFW leg the day before (yes!), but the return never cleared, and I didn't show on the upgrade list. When I got to the airport, ticket counter said I wasn't eligible for an upgrade, but couldn't tell me why. They called AA Customer Service and they couldn't help.
I emailed Customer Service when I got back and the result was confusing emails and a phone call - with the message being,"If you use an SWU on an outbound flight, you can't upgrade a Premium Economy on the return - but you can upgrade an Economy ticket.".
The guy who called me made no sense and clearly didn't understand what was going on.
Anyone else ever run into this? Doesn't make any sense to me, except that they haven't fully upgraded their systems to support PE.
Welcome to FT. Unfortunately it looks like some sort of a glitch kept you off the waitlist for the return portion, who knows. But the answers you received are complete nonsense by AA. Of course there is no requirement that you can only upgrade one way or the other of a PE roundtrip or anything like that (what if you buy a one-way?). Last month I bought a RDU-MXP roundtrip in PE and had no issues whatsoever upgrading both outbound and return with SWUs.
Also, in a lot of cases at an international outstation it can be the blind leading the blind when it comes to clueless agents, as an ill-trained check-in agent calling AA for help at what will usually be middle of the night US time, when you're just a likely to get an equally clueless agent on the phone.