Originally Posted by
worldiswide
Some data points on redeeming a bxp3 (international discounted upgrade award) and ticketing. It took 4 calls over the last 2 days to find someone at meeting services or res that understood what needed to be done. Saw that there was (presumed) availability for an ORD-LHR upgrade in October and put reservation on hold. First call to reservations. We asked what fare class the the held res was in, and asked can you change the fare class to g. The agent had never heard of business extra and asked if it was an AA program. He changed the fare class, but did not price properly so it was not ticketable or viewable after the call. This morning called Meeting Services and a nice voice said, I am a new hire and I have never heard of this program. I am not trained in this. Could not find someone to assist. Called res again, who could see the res, see that it was ticketable, but also had never heard of Business Extra. She did however, say, I will find someone to help you who knows what to do. and... transferred us back to Meeting services to a wonderful experienced agent who was able to fix and price the needed fare class, ticket, confirm the availability of the upgrade and apply the award within 5 minutes. Redeeming was simple and immediate. It all worked out in the end but was interesting to be told by AA agents that they had never heard of this program. Not sure whether it being a secret/unknown program is good for those of us who use it or not.
Sounds about right. Employees outside BE often don’t know squat about the program and in fact can’t do anything to a ticket that has a BE award in it. The BE agents are mostly clueless and often do things wrong. It’s unclear to me if it’s a systemic issue with BE agents themselves or if it’s a program flaw/issue (e.g., is the IT just broke?). Just last week I spent nearly 30 minutes on the phone with a BE agent who just didn’t understand what it meant to apply a BXP1 upgrade. I thought we finally got on the same page and he told me he secured the space and applied the upgrades. Despite me giving him the cert numbers twice and him confirming everything was all set, I got an email the next day from BE dept telling me I failed to provide cert/authorization numbers and my upgrades would soon be cancelled unless I called in immediately to fix.