Originally Posted by
agurg
Thank you everyone. All very good points and suggestions. What I did was to cancel my return ticket on Oman Air and purchased a low-cost carrier one way ticket for $256 and $15 for 30KG bag fee. So, I saved money by flying for less than the baggage fee on Oman Air. As a bonus the return ticket miles were returned to me as well.
Your issue is AS failed to issue the award ticket with baggage endorsement. This was what happened on my Oman Air award. On Oman Manage My Booking screen, it showed ZERO checked bag and ZERO cabin bag. I immediately recognized this was THE SAME PROBLEM that has plaguing AA award tickets on Qatar and Etihad. And this is an ONGOING issues since 3 years ago - it seems all depending on one's luck how the SABRE issued the ticket - it also seems to only affect Middle East partners.
The Sabre system both AA and AS used, seems to require some manual intervention to make the baggage endorsement doc attached to the ticket.
I contacted Oman Air office in JFK both by phone call and by email. The asst manager told me indeed my ticket had NO baggage allowance doc, that I needed to contact AS to reissue the ticket.
Thankfully when I called AS, while the front line agent had no clue but the int'l agent did see the ticket had NO baggage part attached. She contacted Help Desk then came back after 20 min to inform me the ticket was reissued, and the baggage endorsement was attached. When I asked for a new ticket receipt, she said unfortunately there would be none auto-sent because "it had to be processed thru a different part of the system." So I asked her for the new ticket number then went on Oman site to verify - sure enough Oman site now showed 2 tickets, and the language of Zero baggage disappeared. To make sure I further called Oman JFK and the same guy there told me now I was fine since AS reissued a ticket with proper bag allowance endorsement attached.
This again is NOT a new issue - it has been on and off for the past 3 years. Each time whenever redeeming a Middle East partner flight, I feel like playing a Russian Roulette to find out if I have to call for reissue or it is issued correctly the first time. One AA issued QR flight also had no checked bag allowance but with QR it only affected checked bag. So I did not bother to call AA for reissuance. That itinerary also was eventually canceled. The replaced itinerary AA ticket was issued correctly as QR site showed the checked bag info under the class of service column.
With Oman though, even cabin bag would be zero if the baggage allowance endorsement doc is missing!
IIRC when the above happened to me, I created a new thread in AS forum to report such, as well as reported in the related QR threads in AA forum.