Hi all,

Summary: Am I likely to get Original Routing Credit? I did a AA TP run for credit to BAEC, but there were IRROPS. I’m unsure whether I’ll get the Original Routing Credit, despite asking for the trip not to be dealt with as ‘trip in vain’.

My situation
I took some flights for a US-based mileage run to get me to Gold a couple of months early:

The routing was supposed to be DCA-PHL-CLT-RDU-CLT-PHL-DCA all in I class on AA metal (so 40 TPs each, totalling 240 TP overall which is more than enough to get me to just over 1500 TP).

However, the plane for the second flight (PHL-CLT) got diverted due to smoke in the air traffic control tower in CLT. Understandably, we diverted and ended up in GSO, Usually, would be fine but we ended up on a four hour on tarmac because the crew went out of hours - and the airport wasn’t well-equipped for the plane type (we shouldn’t have landed there: We diverted to GSO after CLT had reopened because of the residual delays in air traffic: the Captain told us we’d be down in GSO and up within 30 minutes - but clearly hadn’t accounted for the crew going out of hours).

Nonetheless, I got to CLT and had missed my connection CLT-RDU-CLT-PHL-DCA. There were no other options for that day for that routing so I suggested that they get me to my eventual destination (DCA). They wanted to put this down as a ‘trip in vain’ but I asked them to not do that because I wanted to get the mileage for the whole journey: I was still going to my destination (DCA) which just happened to be my origin point. If my destination had been somewhere else then I would have asked to have been routed through to that final destination instead, rather than getting sent back to DCA.

I’ve requested Original Routing Credit (ORC) for the whole journey as I don’t want to organise another TP run. If only the flights I flew credit then I’ll be 65 short which I can do quickly in early March but I don’t want to have to do that given that I am hoping ORC will be for the entire journey.

I got tweets from AA stating that they’d credit the full itinerary but I foolishly didn’t write down the full itinerary when asking so it is dubious as to what ‘the itinerary’ is! I also had the rebooking agent append a note onto the booking stating that my accrual would not be affected due to IRROPS (the agent even kindly printed it out!). I just don’t trust the system to credit everything.

My question:
Any ideas if it is likely that I’ll get ORC? I’m mostly asking to see whether I should start booking two short flights in early March. I have some Y flights between UK and US in April and May where the Gold Benefits would be really handy. (3 Suitcases bags for AA, for instance; CX First Lounge In LHR T3 and BA GF in LHR T5; AA LHR Arrivals lounge), I’d qualify based on those flights alone but wanted to get the status early to use it on those flights, rather than just earning it on those flights.