Originally Posted by ijgordon
How does the ticket expire worthless? You cancelled your original itinerary and so should be able to apply the value of the ticket to another ticket, minus the change fee of course. What am I missing?
well, if you cancelled your ticket you can't standby for a later flight, can you?
You are not cancelling the ticket, you are telling AA that you want to use your ticket, just on a different flight.
When you do a later flight standby, you loose your right to cancel the ticket (I think?) if you don't get on the later flight. If you want to cancel your non-refundable ticket you have to do it before your originally scheduled flight, not after.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.