fanger

I was wondering if any reschedule (domestic, $150 change fee) automatically triggers a refare, or only triggers it under certain conditions, e.g. Same bucket no longer available.

JDiver

What do your detailed fare rules state? If it's any change, it's any change.

Same Day Flight Change can be a good way of paying less than the $150 change fee (separate thread).

seawolf

As you indicated, same bucket not available.

If you are changing a wholly unused ticket, a refare will occur even if the same bucket is available (subject to original fare rule).

HNL

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A525 Safari/8536.25)

any change initiated by the traveler will trigger a change fee if the original ticket was not flexible.

hillrider

^

hindukid

I never understood this either. If on march 22 I purchase a $200 ORD-LAX one way ticket for April 17 and then on April 15 I decide that I can not leave for another day so I look for April 18. Now because I only have 3 days advance tickets are $600. Am I going to end up paying fare difference of $400 because I no longer have any advance.

Seems like any fare change within 14 days is most likely going to be very expensive.

brp

Yes, of course you are going to change based on the current rates. What's not to understand?

It would seem the way you suggest...and generally is. We got a surprise exception recently. When going to London, upgrades were in jeopardy, so I called to see about changing to flights with better availability. Turns out that, two days before the flight, the fares were about $40 cheaper than our advance purchase, and we got pretty good fares. So, we paid the change fee less the fare reduction and got our upgrades

Cheers.

Often1

You understand perfectly and have it correct. Presuming that you have a non-flexible domestic ticket which includes a change penalty of $150 and you change that ticket (other than through SDC):

1. There is a $150 penalty
2. You pay the fare difference, if any, between the fare you paid and the lowest fare available at the time you make the change.
3. Add 1 & 2.

The reasons for a fare difference could be either that you are no longer eligible for the fare bucket because you no longer meet the advance fare rules, you aren't staying long enough or anything else. Or, it could simply be that the fare bucket into which you booked has been sold out on the new flight and thus you need to purchase a higher fare bucket.

If AA didn't do this, people would game the system by buying dirt cheap tickets in a fare bucket available on any given date and then changing to the flight they really want.