If you read my post you will see that I was booked in Business transcon too and was downgraded to basic economy without seats and no possible "upgrade". I was given the same compensation as OP. 10k miles. A joke. AA is a joke anyways. If they didnt control most of MIA I would travel with United or Delta

When I asked if they could route me on UA, they flatly refused, even though I know AA still has an agreement with UA, but not DL. If they couldn't put me back in I, I would have likely demanded a refund and bought a walk-up fare on UA or DL as they still had tickets to sell.

Update: I got 7,500 miles and a form letter for my troubles. I can only imagine what one gets when they are on an Economy fare.

Dammit, AA made it very clear to their agents that they were not to use B inventory when rebooking non-basic economy passengers. My guess is that the inadvertent booking into B was the product of previous training to rebook into the lowest available inventory.

On an otherwise full flight with availability Y1 H0 S0 N0 Q0 O0 B1, I'd wager that most agents would instinctively choose B over Y, even more so if they're not fully versed in the basic economy product. I doubt many agents have even seen a passenger traveling on such a fare yet, and agents at stations that aren't BE markets wouldn't have had much of a reason to pay attention. The B inventory in markets where BE is not offered may be "phantom" and automatically tied to availability in higher inventories.

AA discourages rebooking into Y if a lower inventory is available, in part because of the "unearned" extra perks like Priority and additional EQMs.

It would be way too easy for IT to imbed a script that upon rebooking, it would automatically choose the original fare booking class or higher. ;)

I think the real travesty is the seeming inability of any front-line agents to rectify these screw-ups. QIK limitation? Or just poor service?

Agree. At least with DL when they moved to their version of QIK left access to the normal system. Thus way agents could fix things. At AA it's sorry we need to call someone or my favorite borrowed from KLM, "that is not possible."

Hopefully continued negative feedback from employees and customers alike will cause them to roll back some of the restrictions. From what I understand rebooking during IROPS took much longer this winter season because there are (legacy AA) agents working in a much more limited system that they are relatively unfamiliar with. And of course the culture among legacy US agents was already "computer says no", so they weren't of much help either.

Thank you. I had no idea there was a "formal" process vs. "informal". I bookedmarked the links so I have more choice as to what to do when AA messes up. The DOT has already reprimanded AA due to an informal complaint I filed and now I know there is a formal way I am excited because it will make AA more accountable.

A colleague just changed the dates of her flights (CX, paid J, booked through AA) and received an email confirmation from AA warning that she was in Basic Economy, with seats in CX J :rolleyes:

Definitely some weird stuff going on with regards to Basic Economy these days.

If it sees the code that AA uses for BE fare class it can get confused.