Originally Posted by
Happy
In other words the phone agent needs to do a Split PNR of some sort for 2 passengers? But for me I do not need to make separate reservations, with all the work being done by the agent, right?
When you said the Ticketing Offices can handle the ticketing using Trip Credit, is it based on personal experiences (or friends' )? I know they do the ticketing with paper voucher the way you described, and one time they apologized because they ticketed me first with the voucher under my name, then ticket my husband after that using the residual value. There was still residual value left they forgot to change the owner's name so the final voucher issued was in my husband's name instead of mine. But in our case, it is no big deal.
To your first question, the original ticket was from way way back with several thousand dollars value paid with partly voucher partly CC. At cancellation we foolishly opted to take the whole value in voucher. Then each year we tried hard to use the value bit by bit. When getting to the expiration I booked a fully refundable ticket to "roll" over the value stored in the fully refundable + residual voucher so we do not lose it all. It has been working until Pandemic that disrupts all things travel related. We do hope we could use it this Summer for a round trip to Canada.
FWIW, the ticketing office had very difficult time to use it for a one-way ticket originated from Canada due to the ticket was priced in CAD. Luckily for us that day there was an agent from Coral Gable office where Plenty of passengers have vouchers in USD but need tickets in South America currencies due to the originating cities, The Coral Gable office knew how to work around the system while the Ft. Lauderdale office has No Clue. That hassle has stopped us to use the value for Canada-US one way which we tend to do each year as part of a much bigger trip, further delaying the draining of the value. :{
It won't be a split PNR, but yes, the agent has to do the work of issuing two tickets under the same PNR, one at a time.
I was speaking from my own experience using Trip Credit. I've had the same experience with paper vouchers by the way. One would think that AA's IT team would be competent enough to figure this out, but honestly, any agent (on the phone or at a ticketing desk) who has to issue a multi-passenger PNR seems to be encountering error messages on the booking system that punts the booking request over to AA's main ticketing department or requires the agent to call in and have it processed manually.
I see, that is an unfortunate set of circumstances you found yourself in. I don't envy your situation... especially now that AA seems to be at least partially blocking some of the typical tricks to "roll" over value at expiration.
I too had a ton of trouble with currency conversions in AA's system. In my case, I initially ended up with a couple thousands dollars' worth of vouchers in foreign currency because of a ticket booked by a family member through a foreign ticketing point, and it's been so insanely complicated trying to buy USD tickets with them. Thankfully now I've successfully converted all the residual value to USD, and only have a few hundred more dollars to spend.