Venk, you are 100% correct. The problem is, unfortunately, that every now and again things like business and family intrude on the very important business of checking and rechecking everything that any service provider does for you. The point, one would like to think, of something like explat status is that you would get a level of service that might allow you to get on with the other things in life.

What really gets my goat is that in a situation like this where things are so obviously messed up you would think that AA would make an attempt to resolve at least some part of this particular set of problems for a good customer. They even refused to rebook the GVA-ZRH flight as AA codeshare without a 200 dollar change fee despite the fact that it would be same flight same day. Even worse, neither of the agents that I spoke to was in any way apologetic for the SNAFU. That at least would have made me feel somewhat better.