Originally Posted by
SMcG_
Wonder if anyone can offer some advice?
With this being your first post, welcome to FT
The first thing I will suggest is please read the post immediately above yours, and some of the material linked/quoted there, as your situation is very similar.
Tried to get through to them, but they're so busy apparently that I can't even be put into a queue.
There has been a
huge wave of schedule changes over the past couple of days, plus it's US Thanksgiving. Wait times can be bad anytime, but with your travel not until April, might as well wait a few days for this all to calm down.
What are my options here?
After consulting the above-mentioned information, find an alternate routing, call AC, and ask them to put you on it. They're almost certainly not going to put you on a BA non-stop, if such a thing exists, but by doing some research, you may find LHR-YYZ-IAH-SJO or something like that works reasonably well for you. And per my comments to the previous poster, you could try to argue for something like LHR-IAH-SJO, but it's a lot less certain they'll give that to you.
There seem to be better connections if I change the routing to LHR > SJO return only, but the prices are now higher for more inconvenient flights. Will they put me on these, or will they try to get me to pay more?
The policy says you can change to another airport within 200 miles, so if you want to swap LIR for SJO, that should be doable. Note though that the AC system only wants to let them make changes to cities that are considered "co-terminals", which usually means roughly in the same city. To illustrate, MIA and FLL are considered co-terminals, so you would generally not have a problem changing one for the other. The 200-mile policy should also allow you to change MIA for MCO, but most agents don't know that and will just say it can't be done when the system tells them they have to re-price. An agent may want to check with a supervisor for CYA purposes before doing it, or may not want to do it at all (and a supervisor may not know the policy and may not approve it). Which may require HUCA.
My highly confident guess is that LIR and SJO aren't co-terminals in the AC system.