Originally Posted by
jordyn
I find it astonishing and sad that anyone would defend AA's position here.
You go through the "Book" flow on the website, not a change booking flow. AA presents the Flight/Travel credit as comparable to any other form of payment with no caveats that anything different is happening. And you're allowed to use multiple credits, which really undercuts the idea that you're just making a change to an existing booking.
To OP, absolutely file a DOT complaint. As far as I know, no other airline takes this position and there's no way for a consumer to understand that the use of a flight or travel credit somehow puts new cash/credit payments into some sort of secret non-refundable space.
Agreed. AA's Travel Credit page even says that Flight Credits are "Created by unused or canceled tickets". The wording is important. A credit is
created and a ticket is
canceled.
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-ser...vel-credit.jsp
Any reasonable person would read this as the previous ticket was canceled, i.e. it no longer exists anymore, and a Flight Credit was created. Given this, how can purchasing a new flight be a change to a ticket if that ticket has been canceled? When you go to book a new trip, you are buying a new ticket, for the first time, as your old ticket no longer exists. Your Flight Credit is a form of payment for that new ticket. That's how AA words this prior to the sale, and the refunds department is full of nasty surprises later.
If you want to point a finger at archaic minutae of how these systems technically handle or represent a credit, that it's really still just an old ticket that never actually got cancelled, I won't argue with you that you're necessarily wrong, but no average person can be expected to know these things, nor reach the conclusion that AA's own plain language is at odds with what actually happens under the hood.