JJeffrey

Unfortunately when booking via Chase, Amex, etc. it's never guaranteed that you will get credit as a special fare, even if all other factors otherwise point to special fare earning. There's really not much you can do, especially if you dont want to risk AA correcting your outbound to fare based as well.

chicagoflyer1976

No the, $1K EQD won't change anything for me, other than my spot on the upgrade list. I should finish in the low $20K for the year.
When I talked to them today, I pointed out that outbound posted as a special fare, and asked why the return didn't. She said the outbound should have posted as a fare, and if they review it, they might change it.
How did you get it fixed? I don't have a copy of the fare rules, and not sure it's worth risking.

eltoddo22

Does anyone have any strategies to share on searching AAvacations? This site is great for earning EQD but is such a pain to search. I've seen on certain routes / dates that there are V* fare class for reasonable amounts. These V* fares are amazing because they earn 15% distance EQD (or 20% if it counts as fare unavailable). I would like to find cheapest routes USA-Asia on V* fare - I guess ITA matrix has a way of searching by fare code but I haven't had any luck getting this to correspond to bulk fare on AAvacations. If anyone has any tips, I'd much appreciate.

777lover

TravelBlerd

Has anyone experienced issues with fares purchased through Chase or AMEX not crediting EQMs correctly after an upgrade occurs? I recently got back from a trip to Chile (ORD-DFW-SCL-DFW-ORD) that I booked through Chase. I booked premium economy with the international flights being having a fare code of P and the domestic portions having a fare code of Y. I was upgraded on the domestic flights through my Platinum Pro status and I used miles+copay to upgrade the international flights to business. All the flights were credited to my account as economy C fares which only gave me 1 EQM instead of the 1.5 EQMs I should have received based on the original fare code.

JJeffrey

Yes, call AAdvantage Customer Service to get it fixed.

AA: wrong EQM after upgrade from Premium Economy

TravelBlerd

HLCinCOU

This isn't correct, or at least not the way I think you mean it. If the fare was in fact a bulk ticket according to the fare rules under which it was purchased, then by policy it credits by distance as a special fare. As many of us have seen sometimes the system messes that up, but that's the policy. I would expect AA to fix it to post as a special fare if you can adequately demonstrate that fact.

This, on the other hand, is likely correct. If chicagoflyer doesn't have the rules now, I'm guessing they're unrecoverable, and there's not much way to prove it was a bulk ticket.

Which brings me to a surprising twist! Pretty sure all of the above is moot in this case anyway, because this wasn't actually a bulk ticket:

Pretty sure I see what actually happened here...that's not in fact the expected behavior for a bulk ticket. I just went back to my AA account to make double sure. Bulk tickets and other special fares actually post as "distance - special fare" not "distance - data unavailable" so the only reason your outbound leg posted the way it did was that they simply lost the fare in reticketing when you made that change. That was never a bulk fare. Did you actually check your fare rules when you bought the ticket? Do you have any other reason to think it was bulk beyond having bought it at Chase?

JJeffrey

The issue is that AA doesn't list out any terms for what will or won't qualify as a bulk fare, consolidator fare, etc. Even if you purchase a 100% bulk fare and have the fare rules to prove it, but it somehow credits by fare paid and not distance, based on my experience you're going to have a hell of a time convincing AAdvantage Customer Service to "fix" it.

This is exactly what I meant when I said earning as a special fare is never guaranteed. Happy to be corrected here, but I'm not aware of a single data point of anyone purchasing what they thought was a special/bulk/consolidator fare through Chase or Amex or another OTA, having it post by fare, and then calling AA and having it successfully re-posted by distance.

This is in stark contrast to special fares purchased via AA Vacations, where AA clearly states that any fares with an asterisk (*) will earn according to the special fare table. If you purchase one of these and it posts by fare (I had this happen earlier this year), it is somewhat easy to get AAdvantage Customer Service to correct it.

HLCinCOU

I don't get this. The fare rules themselves define what kind of fare it is. The fare rules on bulk tickets are clear enough about what they are. How do the fare rules describing the ticket as bulk not prove the ticket was bulk?

Can you be any more specific about the experience you're basing that on? Have you tried it and AA refused, or know of others who have? Also, when you say "if you purchase a 100% bulk fare and have the rules to prove it" you're sort of undermining the argument "there's no definition of bulk fare" you made in the prior sentence.

So, same question: do you have data points for the reverse? I just reread through this whole thread, and I admit I don't have an example of anyone who successfully made such a challenge. But I also don't have an example of anybody who tried and failed. Every DP above either a)never looked at the fare rules and thus doesn't really know it was bulk b)never made a challenge c)never reported back the result of his challenge or d)claimed some truly weird behavior (crediting him at the fare of $1 and other weird stuff) that appear otherwise unsupported.

If there are really examples of people out there who produced actual fare rules that clearly showed a ticket was a consolidator fare, and AA still didn't give them a special fare credit, then OK, AA's criteria really is ambiguous or nonexistent. Otherwise, it seems to me the fare rules control what's bulk and I see no reason to think they won't honor their clearly stated policy when presented with evidence of said fare rules.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether we've let a couple dubious reports throw us off track. After my readthrough just now, I'm starting to wonder whether there are really any accurate reports of truly bulk fares posting by fare. After all, if it's actually bulk AA shouldn't even be able to reconstruct the fare. It's easy to lose fare information you had (like IRROPS reticketing of a published fare etc.) but hard to find it when you didn't have it in the first place. And there are so few reports of it, and most of them shaky. Look at the one from chicagoflyer that just got us back on this subject...that wasn't bulk at all. So, we may be over here debating the causes and response to a problem that doesn't even really exist.

I dunno. But I think we should be very interested in more/better reports of true bulk fares posting by fare, and the results to any challenges to them. And I absolutely welcome any data points from elsewhere...

milesforhire

As you noted, the problem is that AA doesn't want to share that info openly. For my Amex Travel itinerary, I tried for months to dig up the fare rules. I called in, tried using the old Print itinerary trick on AA, searched Amex Travel, called Amex Travel. None of them were able to even find the fare rules, so I had to just fly it and see what it posted as. So I have no clue if I was wrongly or rightly given the right miles/MQD or not.

So I'm not going to challenge it because I have no ground to stand on when they ask for proof.

HLCinCOU

Well that's a different issue. In your case you don't have access to the fare rules. At Chase (where I usually go looking for my bulk fares) the rules are right there in the flight selection before you book; my understanding is the same is true for City. My contention is that if you have the fare rules it shouldn't be a problem for AA to go fix their crediting. If I understood JJeffrey right he's claiming they will not honor that, which I find highly unlikely.

Also, just for future reference, this post indicates you can pull the fare rules out of the AMEX portal as well. That's from a year ago, so it's possible that changed, but take a look...

JJeffrey

I think we are just interpreting what little terms AA has posted for special fares differently.

My interpretation: AA is saying that (in layman's terms) in some cases we have no idea how much you paid for your ticket, and in these cases miles will be awarded according to the special fares chart. Most of these instances involve bulk fares, consolidator fares, package bookings, etc. etc. But we are in no way guaranteeing that all bulk fares etc. will post as special fares. If we catch a whiff of how much your ticket costs, we will post it by fare.

In my personal experience, I booked a special fare via AA Vacations, it incorrectly posted by fare, and it took 3 phone calls and about 5 emails to get it correctly sorted, in spite of the fact that for AA Vacations the terms are clearly spelled out (unlike bulk fares). They threw every excuse in the book at me.

So again, until there are any DP's that prove otherwise, I would expect a hell of a time trying to convince AAdvantage Customer Service to correct a bulk fare that posted by fare, when all you are armed with is the vague aa.com language.

chicagoflyer1976

When I called and asked about it, they told me that the outbound shouldn't have posted the way it did (Distance - Data Unavailable), and that it should have been reviewed for a fare. When the return leg posted, it did take a couple of days to post, which makes me think there may have been manual intervention involved.

I went back and looked at a couple of other tickets I had booked via Chase, and they all posted as Distance - Special Fare.

I had one other trip this year that posted as Distance- Data Unavailable (thankfully it was a very positive outcome) after I had changed the ticket a few times. I guess I got lucky on that one.

HLCinCOU

Yeah, this is pretty typical. Lots of times reticketing (IRROPS/SWU/etc.) causes the system to somehow lose the fare. That's what causes the "data unavailable" as opposed to "special fare" listing. There have been reports of AA going in and correcting those, so I wouldn't ever bet my status on such flights...best to make sure you have enough EQM/EQD even if they get fixed. Fingers crossed that the SWU reticketing causes this glitch on my LAX-AKL rt next week ;-)

Yep, so those were bulk tickets but the one you referenced before was not. All pretty normal behavior. Always check the fare rules before booking if you're specifically trying to get a special fare.

Yep, agree completely. Just one other note: if you ever have one post "data unavailable" and it's not favorable, just call them up and have them fix it manually. I've done that a few times and it has always been quick and easy. This gives us a nice little system-gaming opportunity...get the unfavorable ones fixed and leave the favorable ones.