New policy re: cancelled flight rescheduling and keeping miles and copay upgrades
 

I am on a flight LAX-JFK that was deleted from the schedule months in advance. I used miles plus copay. I was moved from the cancelled 9 am to a 7 am flight. When I requested the 10am flight I was told I could only be put in coach and be waitlisted for the upgrade even though it was already confirmed on the earlier flight. I received a reply from Twitter that indicated the same thing. Is this a new horrible policy?
There are numerous J seats available.

It's certainly a horrible policy.

Not new. AA's insistence to keep isolated fare buckets certainly seems unnecessary sometimes, especially in your case where they cancelled your flight.

It drives me nuts on SDFC, where the original fare needs to be available. So there needs to be an A fare seat available to switch if you have used miles copay. Give me a break.

How does it help them with revenue to force you to stay in one plane, rather than allow you to switch flights? No idea. Also seems agents don't have the discretion they should be given to make these sort of changes.

With Twitter, you might ask them to forward your flight change request to the Aadvantage desk? (Others might know, who has the final say on whether to open an award seat?)

I'm not seeing this as new either.

In the case of schedule -change-.

In the case if schedule -irregularity- they will protect in cabin you're in (try to, obviously) including an upgraded cabin.

What if the flight gets added back with plenty of inventory available? Kind of a long shot, but a few months out anything could happen.

A lot of discretion is going away post-merger. Many things that could be done in native Sabre are not possible in QIK for example.

^