Originally Posted by
zoombee
I believe the lesson here is that what the ticketing party tells you cannot be relied on. All that really matters is if ticketing completes.
Most people would assume they had met the criteria of that email (payment has been made) when they call and ask to buy, give over a credit card number, see the relevant amount held on their card, are told it is locked in, ask for that to be confirmed with ticketing who also say its locked in.
Moreover I just pushed for actual ticketing on another reservation. It's showing ticketed but AA have still not taken payment (the hold is still there) and yet I think there is no chance that AA will do all of: cancel and rebook and at a price over twice the amount, call to tell me there is no credit card hold that matches the required amount, get told the amount is not as agreed and I do not accept the new amount, charge my card the over x2 amount anyway, then do it again with rtw desk supervisor approval when it bounces, tell me the problem is my card decline when i call to ask what's going on.
Of course if all that matters is if you are ticketed, then things *likely* to mean ticketing will happen will matter to some degree. Calling and "paying" usually works but that wasn't enough this time for me.
Several things differ between the xONEx that ticketed and the one that didn't. I'm unclear which, in combo perhaps, made the difference (vs just luck).
1. The ticket payment hold was in USD in the failed case vs the currency of the reservation in the other.
2. Ticketing was left to AA in the failed case who took two days to start working on it and I believe did so outside the US vs my calling the rtw desk a day after it was sent to ticketing and have them press for ticketing then and there.
3. The failed case was governed by CX and there was a new higher price at the time of ticketing vs the other which was governed by MH who had no filed fare at all at the time of ticketing.
Oh, and may or may not be relevant. The ticketed xONEx receipt is ~$1k less than the amount that was on the resevation. I suspect i'm going to wind up with two transactions on my card, one of the receipt and one for the gap. I've no idea why but it suggests a complexity to ticketing, and varied results from a complex manual process is to be expected.
The basic issue is that complex RTWs are manually ticketed so choices or simple mistakes can happen which mean something that should or at least might ticket... doesn't. Words of promise in an email or on the phone do not count for as much as what the actual ticketing agent does.
This is seriously giving me a headache to read. It's quite clear, it's ticketed or it's not, there's no grey zone in between.
These aren't normal tickets in any stretch of the imagination. You're not going to AA.com, BA.com, Expedia, etc. and getting instantly ticketed like many people are used to.
It's extremely rare that actual base fares are so volatile and fluctuate so quickly. In the case of a direct booking on AA or another airline, whether on their website or a third party site like Expedia, they pull the appropriate fare bucket inventory when you book it and they typically ticket a few seconds after your payment is confirmed, base fares don't change in that short period of time.
That's not how RTW fares work, and this was a very volatile point in time on the ex-CAI fare. RTWs take hours or even days to ticket / re-ticket. Even on my own, it increased a bit between the day QF quoted me my change fee and when they ticketed it so they had to reverify my authorization with me, but I didn't care it wasn't significant yet. But it was a sign that the base fare increase was imminent.
It sounds like you got yours done on the MH fare basis at the last minute, so congrats on that because not too long ago there were reports that AA was refusing ex-CAI bookings except for EXP and CK members, let alone non-AAdvantage members entirely. So please stop pointing fingers at AA for something they didn't do. You literally got in at the last second of this fare and be grateful if you got something ticketed.
Again it wasn't an AA fare they were issuing the ticket on, they were at the mercy of other OW airlines keeping the fare alive and we all know that AA doesn't have instant ticketing on these, they need approval from the rate desk first. You HAVE to allow 1-2 days leeway on AA ticketed RTWs, and the fare simply disappeared in that amount of time this week. That's simply it, the fare is there at ticketing or it's not... there's no fare hold, there's no credit card hold so you're safe, etc. It's there at the time of ticketing or it's not... end of story. Very very different than normal JFK-ORD fares.