Originally Posted by
tennessetom
So it isn’t really a charge so much as you need to buy a ticket in the same cabin of service and the ticket is sold at 10 percent of the actual fare as I understand it, if I recall the rules for refund etal are then dependent on the fare rules of the ticket you bought so there is no one answer fits all, you would need to look at the fare rules for the ticket of the infant in arms, to further complicate you flight is originating outside the us
The complication here is that the adult tickets were award tickets. It would be convenient if the lap infant ticket was also an award ticket, priced at 10% of the miles, but that's not how it works. What fare do the use to calculate the 10% of? I'm sure people wouldn't be happy if it was full fare ticket, so perhaps they pick the lowest available cash fare available at the time and charge 10% of that. But, the "free baggage" that comes along with that might be non-refundability. It may be a corner case where the various rules align in a way that nobody intended. It could also be that there's a policy somewhere that makes the infant fare refundable in this case, but requires a manual override because the computer thinks it's non-refundable. If this is the case, then it may be a matter of finding someone that knows about this and can approve.
I would fill out a request on aa.com/refunds. IIRC, there's a section where you can put in a freeform explanation, where you can explain the particulars.