hillrider

Interesting article at http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel...arge/14296821/

Apparently there's an implementation issue in Sabre (which AA uses to fare and issue tickets) and all GDSs, which claim they haven't had enough time to code in a new, never-before-used, definition of "stopover" that the TSA came up with on 20 June 2014 (source: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx...se49.9.1510_13) and entered in effect on 21 July 2014:

Specifically (2) is new and it's not coded in the GDS pricing engines, so as a result any connection over 4 hours is considered a stopover for TSA tax purposes and is being charged the $5.60 TSA tax, even if connections between 4:00 and 11:59 hours for non-continental or foreign itineraries shouldn't be.

An example is a LHR-ORD-SFO trip where the connection at ORD is 4:30: according to the rules you should not pay the $5.60 TSA tax at ORD, but in today's tickets you're charged for it.

According to the article, 150,000 Sabre tickets per month (and 300,000 tickets per month for all reservation systems), or about 1% of all tickets are being overcharged this tax.

It appears that if one of your tickets issued on or after 21 July 2014 falls in this category you're due a (small) refund, but if you're interested in pursuing it good luck getting it -- I have no clue where to even start (probably AA refunds department).

Sant

The $5.60 TSA fee is now an additional $5.60 YQ.

bedelman

On July 23 I booked an AAdvantage award ticket for BOS-JFK-DOH (intercontinental) with a 10 hour 35 minute same-calendar-day connection in JFK. (I have my reasons!) I was correctly charged $5.60. So whatever system computed the tax, it seems to have gotten this right for me, contrary to the article' report that affected passengers would be charged excessive tax.

hillrider

Update: According to Sabre, they became "fully compliant with the new AY fee structure" on 14 August.

Therefore only AA tickets issued between 21 July and 13 August are potentially (as per previous post) affected.

Dr. HFH

An interesting tidbit by itself. So on average, half of all tickets go through SABRE.

Dave Noble

That isn't deducible from the comment

There are a lot of tickets sold globally where there is no US component. All that can be inferred is that approximately 50% of tickets for travel in US where tax has been overcharged have been ticketed through Sabre

Dr. HFH

Fair enough, but it's not as simple as "travel in the U.S." From the article:

Dave Noble

I did start by referring to travel with a US component

It is only where travel includes the US that this tax item would exist and be an issue .

For travel completely outside the US, e.g. from Hong Kong to Taipei , the tax item would not even be relevant and even come into tax calculations


the 300,000 tickets where overcharging occurred represent 1% of all the tickets sold , so all that can be inferred is that at least 0.5% of tickets sold are issued by Sabre

There is nothing from the information provided that shows Sabre issues a large percentage of tickets globally