Originally Posted by whimsey21

Hi all-- I had an award booked DCA-BOS-DOH-BOM for travel next Spring. I noticed this morning that availability appeared on IAD-DOH on my date of travel, so I phoned to get the DCA-BOS-DOH replaced by the nonstop. The agent I spoke with told me that she could make the change, but would levy a $150/ticket fee since I was changing airports. I questioned this, and she went to ask her "help desk," and then came back and said that they would make a one-time special exception. At that point the AA phone system disconnected me with a message saying they were experiencing technical difficulties, and then connected me to a different agent. I told her that we were in the process of reissuing the new tickets, and she also told me that I had to pay the change fee. I told her that I had been given an exception and she went to talk to the help desk again, and then came back and said she was waiving the fee. I'm confused, however, as to why this was considered a change in destination. In the past, I've always found that AA treated the WAS co-terminals (DCA, IAD, BWI) as equivalent;I've changed between them for free quite a few times on paid tickets when a schedule change created issues with my original routing. The AA booking tool also seems to treat them equivalently-- if I enter DCA as an origin or destination, it automatically brings up routings to or from IAD and BWI (and often creates roundtrips leaving from one and returning to another). So i'm wondering- has something changed in the AA rules such that co-terminals are no longer treated as such, or was this a prior rule and I just got lucky with those previous ticket changes? It will be helpful to know before I book another award ticket with a suboptimal routing and then try to get a better routing when seats open up.