Since there's no benefit for you to cancel the ticket, and you can't change it, just leave it as is. Then hope for a significant time change for the scheduled flight, or for the flight to be canceled. If you luck out and either of those happens, then you should be able to opt for a full refund of even a nonrefundable non-changeable ticket.

Completely inflexible tickets are a recent development in the US with the advent of BE fares on AA, DL, and UA. But, they have been around for many years for tickets sold in other countries on US carriers and most non-US carriers have offered them for years.

This is not about blame, it is about fault and owning responsibility for one's actions.

Whether one is experience or inexperienced, if you choose to check boxes without reading what you are agreeing to, that comes to a sticky end. Not just for air tickets. Put another way, it's fine to skip through those sorts of acknowledgements. But, you can't then complain.

OP may choose never to fly AA again and that is fine. But, this specific problem will repeat itself if he is not careful. Other problems will occur if he is not careful as well.

I would try writing to AA customer relations and see what they do for you.

I got a similar <bleep> excuse when I rang AA a few years back to change a ticket I had bought from their website (which re-directed me to the Netherlands website). The call centre in the States said that the ticket was booked by a travel agent, not by AA, and refused to touch it. They don't seem to "see" that tickets they sell overseas (at least in some markets) are actually AA bookings.

In my case, it WAS booked in a changeable fare - they just denied that they were the ones that had sold it.

Good luck - cos after several headbanging phone calls, I gave up!

In general , a LOT of people are not based in the USA and non refundable/non changeable tickets are pretty common globally - even with business and 1st class fares. for instance AA's I class r/t fare from London to Chicago at USD3451 plus taxes and charges allows no changes and no refunds at all

Anyone that doesn't think it is worth checking the cancellation and change penalties before paying have themselves to blame - it is not the airline's fault if the person chooses to do so.. Personally , I will take the 30 seconds to check the refunds/changes and stopover policies

It isn't necessary to check all the rules, but the penalty conditions are very important to check

Travel insurance is perfectly common to purchase when travelling internationally. indeed, without travel insurance in place , I wouldn't have even received travel permission to bring my foster son with me to the UK. It is the "victim's" fault if the person chooses to blithely purchase without checking rules or having anything in place to address unexpected situations. Choose to self insure and that is the passenger's choice

The OP may choose not to use AA next time, but can expect that other carriers are likely to have similar rules

Honestly what circumstance should the OP claim for special relief? "I didn't imagine that fares this restrictive exist so they shouldn't apply to me" or "I've decided that I'm not going to fly American again because your flights are late so please let me out of the restrictive terms and conditions that I didn't read but still agreed to".

I think that outside of Basic Economy, AA.com does a crap job at highlighting key features of the fare (specifically change fees). The details are almost always only buried in the fare rules, which you can't even get to until a small link at the bottom of the page right before you click "purchase." So they're most likely covered from a legal perspective. But this doesn't mean regulators can't require more prominent placement (like some other airlines do) if they were so inclined, perhaps after a significant volume of consumer complaints (maybe wishful thinking in this environment).

Of course the fact that the ticket was purchased on the Japanese website would be a wrinkle in this.

If it was sold from the Japanese site, in Yen, perhaps its held to some other set of restrictions than we are accustomed in the USA?

Except its not that simple to see the fare rules which are typically just summarized and not put in full. I did a sample search on aa.co.jp for LAX to Tokyo, and the most restrictive V fare firstly does not show the fare conditions unless you click through to a different tab/page, and under there it says:

• Changes*: Not applicable (See reissue conditions)
• Reissue: Allowed with restrictions
• Penalty fee for ticket reissue between: 27800 JPY / 27800 JPY (at today exchange rates 27800 JPY / 27800 JPY)
• New travel dates must be prior to: Friday, 12. July 2019
• Maximum Reissue penalty fee for entire ticket: 27800 JPY

Now how am I supposed to interpret that? Are changes allowed or not? Changes are not allowed but reissue is? What does that even mean? And yes, aa.co.jp has this weird "Changes not applicable but reissue with penalty" language which doesn't exist on aa.com

And if the tickets are bought on OTAs, I've often found that full fare conditions are never available till you actually buy the ticket, only the basic high level summary saying "penalties for change/cancel".

Given that this is a fare originating in Japan, it may well have been booked on the JP site

On this site it shows ( picking a random ticket to USA)

and for cancellations

and shows the fare basis to be QLX55ZN1

All of this before even leaving the flight selection page

If seeing that, I wouldn't be continuing without checking by calling or trying on another site

In the end, it seems that the OP agreed to purchase a ticket with no refunds/no changes permitted and AA is simply following the fare rules

+1

As [MENTION=865042]nomiiiii[/MENTION] said nicely, I think that this kind of response is very unhelpful. It is totally unreasonable to expect a consumer to read the fine print every time one purchases anything; it would probably take me more than 24 hours/day to do so on all of my purchases and web site agreements. There's just too much fine print on everything.

ALSO FARE RULES ARE WRITTEN IN SUCH AN OPAQUE FORMAT WITH NO PUNCTUATION AND ALL CAPS FORMATTING AND MANY RULES THAT ACTUALLY DONT APPLY TO THE TICKET BEING PURCHASED AT ALL IF YOU ARE POSTING IN THE UNITED FORUM ON REDDIT YOU SHOULD NOT DISCUSS THAI POLITICS THERE IS ALSO NO CAPACITY TO GO BACK AND FIND THE FARE RULES AFTER PURCHASE THAT THEY TAKE EVEN LONGER TO READ THAN MOST COMPARABLELENGTH FINE PRINT SOME OTHER AIRLINES LIKE ALASKA DO A GOOD JOB OF SUMMARIZING THE FARE RULES IN A LEGIBLE BULLET POINT FORMAT WITH A LINK TO THE MACHINE FORMATTED RULES IF YOU REALLY WANT THE DETAILS AA WOULD DO WELL TO FOLLOW THAT EXAMPLE I ATTRIBUTE THEIR FAILURE TO DO SO TO A DELIBERATE ATTEMPT TO HIDE RULES

And with basic economy fares, AA shows that they are very capable of giving clear warnings for unusually-restrictive fares. Given that AA has not historically issued any ex-US unchangeable fares and is very clear about their warnings for tickets purchased in the US, it's reasonable for a consumer -- especially an informed and reasonably-frequent flyer -- to not know that they do issue ex-Asia and ex-Europe unchangeable fares on the same routes. Having reasonable fare conditions with unusual fare conditions explicitly and clearly called out is entirely reasonable to ask.

In fact, I only knew that ex-Europe and ex-Asia unchangeable fares existed because of past posts on FlyerTalk. So both that warning and the creation of public pressure to make airlines be at the very least more clear in disclosing these unusual (to an American) restrictions are very appropriate roles for FlyerTalk. Saying "you should have known because it was buried deep in the illegible fine print" is not respectful of other posters and undermines one of the things FlyerTalk can do very well.

It's very hard for me to place blame on someone for applying expectations of AA fare rules based on considerable experience buying AA tickets to an AA ticket when AA doesn't clearly indicate that something is unusual for them this time. And I don't blame someone at all for not reading deliberately-obtuse fine print; that is not a reasonable expectation. Instead, I expect the airline with the lawyers to develop clear language that explains what they're selling you.

(I realize that I might be straying into ad hominem here; I'm self-reporting this post to moderators. But this attitude is quite common in this forum -- not unique to the poster I'm responding to at all -- and I think makes the forum less useful.)

If the language shows that as clearly as it does, that helps significantly compared to the US AA.com site. (Although saying "CHANGES: NOT APPLICABLE" instead of "CHANGES: NO CHANGES ALLOWED") leaves it much less clear than it should be.

Really?