This is not an unusual issue.
The answer really doesn't change.
Either you and AA find flights that are agreeable, or you are entitled to a refund, without charge.

Flight schedules are subject to change, and often do.

Can I cancel a schedule change w/o penalty?
 

It has been a while since I encountered this problem, so any advice is appreciated!

I redeemed a BA award from HAM to CPT return.

The original return was supposed to be on 24th Nov. Departing CPT early morning, arriving LHR that evening, and first flight out to HAM next day on 25th. Arriving HAM at 1030am. But due to schedule change, I now arrive on an overnight flight from CPT, connecting at 1035am and arriving 115pm. 3 hours later than originally scheduled. I have a meeting in HAM at noon though!!

The BA schedule change sort of sc**ws up my own plans. So if I am to cancel now, will AAdvantage still charge me the $100 refund fee?

I am not Exec Plat (not anymore anyway :( )

No, they won't. Because of the schedule change they will let you cancel the award with no redeposit fee. This is a far-reaching general experience here. If the first agent, for some reason, won't do it - call back. You will get it.

Cheers.

In short, you can cancel without redeposit fees for a schedule change.

And I think the redeposit fees are $150 now.

Thank you.

It was funny to hear the Exec Plat Desk in Frankfurt leave me a message on this !

Will call the US office later.

In general, a schedule change has to be significant (more than 2 hours) before they'll waive the fee.

I cancelled a similar itin between LHR-CPT for the exact same reason.

The UK EXP line wouldn't waive the fee so I contacted the US line right away (they're far better in general) and they cancelled without fee. Without me even having to ask the agent told me that there would be no charge.

Do you have support for this? I've seen others claim 90 minutes, but have never seen support for that either.

Does anyone have a link on AA.com about this?
 

Does anyone have an actual link to aa.com on this?

My flight departure was changed by 2 hours and 15 minutes. Granted I was planning to cancel the ticket anyway as it was 8 months into the future, but, I was waiting to see if a significant schedule change would occur so that I would be justified in getting a voucher/refund without being hit with a change fee.

Of course when I went to the airport to cancel and then book a new ticket (different destination) they still levied the change/cancellation fee despite the over 2 hour schedule change. The agent did say that he does not think I should be charged it, but, not he nor his supervisor could override the computer system (so they said anyway).

Thus now, I'm writing a letter to AA, but, really would like to have reference to their own terms and conditions on this. I have spent the better part of an hour searching aa.com and haven't found anything regarding this yet. Sad thing is, about 6 months ago, I swore I had stumbled upon that information on their site fairly easily.

Try this

https://www.aa.com/i18nForward.do?p=...ce/Refunds.jsp

It mentions refunds for schedule changes, although it is not specific on fees.

There was information under the "Agency" section that I'm also not easily pulling up.

Cheers.

http://www.aa.com/i18n/agency/Bookin...ule_240_80.jsp

See the section titled Protection For Schedule Change in the notes section (#2)

That's the one. Note, though, that this is information for them to share with travel agents and is not binding upon AA. Experiences here say that they have been pretty good about giving fee-free refunds in this case, but they don't actually have to. So tone the request accordingly :)

Cheers.

Sorry to say this, but your mistake was going to the airport. If you had done it over the phone and gotten an agent who claimed that they couldn't waive the change fee, you would have been able to follow the FT mantra of politely hanging up and calling back. Not that the transaction is completed, it is much more difficult to get AA to do anything about it. It's still worth pursuing though; you might end up with a voucher in an equivalent amount.

For you or if anybody else has this quandary in the future, I think your problem came about due to you going to the airport to do this. If you had called in, it should have been handled correctly and routinely.

There's more to this story.

I wanted to make sure I had the voucher in my hot little hands immediately. I couldn't risk an actual refund to the original payment source, as the original payment source would have been Citibank's 'ThankYou' Network.


There's a whole thread in the credit card forum on this, but, essentially at the end of Feb of this year Citibank completely devalued it's 'ThankYou Points' to about 1/2 their value.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other...trategies.html

Since I was dropping someone off at the airport anyway, had an unpaid reservation that I needed to purchase, and, I noticed the more than 2 hour schedule change, I thought it optimal time to go cancel the original ticket, book a new flight using that residual value, and then walk away with my voucher. Thus assuring that I got the 'value' refunded to me, and not to the ThankYou Network.

I was not going to risk $2389 in travel voucher (about $1189 above what those 120K 'ThankYou' points are now worth) in order to avoid a problems with getting $150 change fee waived -- I was already prepared from day 1 to pay the change fee anyway, naturally, I just wanted to cancel the ticket at an optimal time in hopes I could get it waived.

Now that I am armed with more specific and documented information, I will phrase a nice and polite letter to AA customer service and hope they issue me a $150 eVoucher or something equivalent.