Originally Posted by
zoombee
That's very helpful info in there, though it's more likely to land and be useful if not packaged with a sugar coated rebuke. I'm happy to take this message: the only thing that matters if if you're ticketed. Any mistakes by the airline, any assurances by the agent, any assurances by ticketing are all meaningless. Especially if the airline has decided something is a mistake fare which is AA's line here. So if it takes an hour staying on the line asking for ticketing, do that rather than accept assurances if ticketing is important to you.
This was a very unique situation, so yeah basically all you said is true and it only matters once it's actually ticketed. It wasn't a mistake fare at all, but it wasn't an AA fare either, AA pulled their own ex-CAI RTW fares quite a while ago. That's the key to the puzzle. Once they no longer had another OW carrier's fare basis to issue on, that was the end of it on AA tickets.
They were using the fare basis of other OW airlines who still had the fare filed at the old price in EGP. Once EGP devalued it made the fare much cheaper in USD, but certainly wasn't a mistake fare. All airlines except QR and AA used to price ex-CAI in EGP (QR and AA had USD fares which were only a few hundred $$ different until the devaluation).
But definitely yes, there was an urgency on this to get it ticketed ASAP, and that was really clear when the Star Alliance fares were pulled very quickly post-devaluation. I want to say that *A folks only had one or two days to get theirs ticketed before that party ended. (it was also a good bit cheaper than our OW fares)
I disagree with what
LilZeppelin said though about AA only being used to US$10k+ RTWs, a good number are issued ex- OSL, CAI, and TYO and are all well under the ex-North America price. I have a feeling that ex-South Africa may gain some popularity again soon as well as the base fare isn't bad and it allows more stopovers in each of the primary continents. (ex-OSL and ex-CAI limit you to 2 stopovers in Europe, and ex-TYO limits you to 2 stopover in Asia, Africa on the other hand no longer has a OW carrier so stopover opportunities are extremely limited... note all of North Africa is classified as Europe or the Middle East by OneWorld, so AT flights are to/from Europe and QR flights are to/from Middle East, we won't have a true African carrier again until RwandAir (WB) joins)
The good news is that ex-OSL and ex-TYO are still out there and are still very good deals (sure not sub-$5000, but still quite good). ex-OSL you have to be very careful about chosen carriers because of the sting on YQ, but ex-TYO you don't have to worry about it, it's YR only and they are quite reasonable. (about $600-800 total taxes and airline fees is normal ex-TYO on a DONE4 or DONE5). From what I've noticed over the last couple of years in this thread, ex-OSL is by far the most offensive if you're not choosing carriers to avoid YQ. ex-CAI didn't seem nearly as bad in that regard but still had a hefty amount of YQ.