SSABrazil

I was booked on SSA-MIA-RDU for 5/16 (award travel), but AA has discontinued the SSA-MIA flights starting this week and left me with this itinerary: 5/17 SSA-CGH, GRU-MIA, MIA-RDU (23 hours of flight/airports, notice airport switch in Sao Paulo).
Obviously this is not ideal, because it adds 7 hours to my journey and requires for me to pay for 2 nights hotel out of pocket, plus taxis between airports (reddit is saying this is a red flag in Sao Paulo, AA rep says NBD), lost day of wages leaving one day later, and the ungodly hour of 4am flight arriving midnight in RDU (need a hotel b/c we can't get a ride that late at night).

And here's what I have already done: I have called AA 5 times and given them several specific itineraries asking to be rerouted to. They refused each time and gave me this reason: TAM, their Brazilian partner, won't ticket certain flights [but some of these itineraries, like this one which uses AA metal out of Brazil, they won't give to us: TAM/JJ3567 - SSA-BSB, 14:56-16:50 (16 May)
AA/AA214 - BSB-MIA, 21:50-04:45 (Departs 16 May, Lands 17 May)
AA/AA1266 - MIA-RDU, 09:23-11:33 (17 May)].

FT members, does that sound right? If not, is there anything else I can do at this point?

Dave Noble

Things you could do are get a full refund and just book a paid ticket on an airline that can do the trip more reasonably

You could ask AA to reroute you starting from BSB and then buy a flight to BSB. At $185 fpr a oneway flight, I think you will be better off than what you have currently

If there are no award seats available to AA on JJ, then I think that you will be out of luck there

SSABrazil

Thanks for your reply, Dave. I cannot afford the first option. As for the second option, I could do that, as a flight to BSB isn't too bad, but since it's a decoupled itinerary I'd have to leave plenty of time for delayed/canceled flight, which means the overall flight time would be about the same (24 hours). And my baggage could get lost in BSB and I wouldn't have recourse, because I'd have to jump on my flight to the USA and I doubt the Brazilian airline would ship it there.

Dave Noble

I would have thought that 5 hours should be enough time, surely?

MSPeconomist

In Sao Paolo, there's a public airport bus service that runs buses frequently between CGH and GRU, so you won't need to take a taxi.

ajeleonard

But why should he have to take the bus when there are SSA-GRU flights?

cl.lurker

I believe they have to be codeshare flights, not just any JJ flight.

OP: did you try going through GIG?

benfro6

It looks like your best bet it likely to go through GIG, as mentioned above. Agreed that the airport transfer in Sao Paulo does not sound like fun. Challenge here is AA is not required to give you whatever you want, they are required to try to reasonably accommodate you (it sounds like JJ is the issue) or provide you with a full refund. Looks like you could do an AD/B6 codeshare flight - NOT AA - for a reasonable price if you are in a major pinch.

I doubt that you had no way to know about the cancelled leg until today - this likely was loaded into the schedule months ago. More reason to check on your itins regularly...

Adam1222

The announcement of canceling the route was relatively recent - April 4.

For some reason, AA agents have difficulty "seeing" a lot of TAM flights for booking purposes. Are they perhaps only looking at flights with TAM award availability?

I would elevate it if they cant get you on any of the SSA-GIG, SSA-BSB, or SSA-GRU flights.

3Cforme

If there is a formal protection plan due to cessation of AA-operated services where AA is willing to buy tickets on other carriers' metal, agents and supervisors should quickly find it documented. If there isn't, of course agents are only looking at available (non-AA) award inventory.

Adam1222

Thank you for that feedback.
I do not disagree with you as to what agents and supervisors "should" be able to. But "should" and reality are different things. Having recently dealt with a similar issue twice, AA agents were indeed having difficulties "seeing" TAM flights, insisting that they didn't operate.

I took the liberty to look at the award inventory at issue. "of course", that does not actually line up with what the OP is being told, as there appears to be TAM award inventory on SSA-BSB.

SSABrazil

Update: I reached out to AA on twitter and they handled the ticketing through a twitter DM. I just checked and the status moved from "on request" to ticketed, so TAM has accepted our preferred flight itinerary (on AA metal from Brazil to MIA). Thanks for your help.