My wife and I hold 2 round trip biz class tickets to Saigon, Vietnam we obtained as award travels from *Alliance. We are changing our minds and want to go to Europe instead... I talked to a *Alliance agent last night and he told me we'd have to pay $100 per ticket to return them (paper tix, ANA outbound, SQ return).

I did not get a good answer why I had to pay this $100 per ticket fee?
Can I simply exchange these tickets for European ones? Providing the are some... according to the agent, there's NOTHING open over Atlantic.