I had an interesting experience last night I thought might be useful to others on here. I found an itinerary I was interested in that appeared to be available at a good price on AA.com. I got through to the final booking screen several times but kept getting the “Choose a different flight or fare” error on the website.

I ringed up the Executive Platinum line and told them about it; they told me that I needed to talk to web services and transferred me over. I told the web services person my dates/flights and how I searched for them on AA.com. She looked into it and told me that sometimes there is a discrepancy in our systems and we can’t offer you that fare, your new fare will be (about $200 more than what I saw online) and that they could not honor the online price.

I told her that I use Sabre (really expert flyer) and validated that O inventory was available for all segments, I also read off the fare basis code and told her that I read through the fare rules and validated that the flights met the conditions of the rules. She asked me if I was a travel agent, to which I responded, no, I’m just an educated consumer. She said that there wasn’t anything she could do, I suggested that she call the tariff desk to have a Phase IV ticket issued. She put me on a surprisingly brief hold and came back to tell me that her supervisor approved an exception.

She took my payment info and told me that the AACoRN system does allow overrides for inventory availability—Phase IV isn’t required accomplish this. Apparently one of my segments didn’t really have O inventory in Acorn, my ticket did get issued at the lower price with the segment that had an availability issue appearing on the PNR twice, once in Y and once in O. I went onto prefunds.aa.com to view a detailed receipt, but the Y segment doesn’t show there. The O segments do show using the O fare basis. Also, I wasn’t able to assign seats myself online, but the EXP desk was able to do it for me after the ticket got issued.

I just thought I’d post this here as a PSA of sorts, if you get this issue online, Web Services can override if they want, but you might need to be super persistent.