My apologies if this is answered somewhere, but I could not find anything.

Does anyone have experience dealing with a ticket with no changes allowed on AA? I did not know these tickets existed and am shocked because I did not see anything when purchasing the ticket or in the confirmation email. This was not a cheap ticket, either.

AA does indeed sell tickets which do not permit changes.

If you have purchased such a ticket, then your choices are to take the flights or lose the ticket

If you have travel insurance and you are wanting to change for a reason covered by insurance, then best to contact your insurance company

Basic economy is a zero changes allowed ticket in the US.

https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/...ic-economy.jsp

Was this ticket purchased outside the USA, or is it a Basic Economy [Fare Code = B] ticket?

It's a V fare, purchased in Japan, cost about $1,370 round trip Tokyo to New York.

It was purchased directly on the AA website, but when I'm in Japan it always transfers me to the Japanese site, forcing me to pay in yen. The AA USA English reservation line said I had to call the Japanese line. The Japanese line said they couldn't do anything, and transferred me to a "manager" who seemed Southeast Asian. The manager rudely said she'd make a note in my file, then hung up on me after telling me to check the AA USA site myself for the customer service number as she wouldn't give it to me.

Where is it from and to , approx date and date purchased?

Did you check a box and agree to the terms and conditions before purchasing the ticket?

Sorry, I edited the post above yours.

I guess I learned something the hard way... Had no idea such tickets existed.

I just talked to a USA help person, who said that all the terms and conditions are laid out when you purchase.
My confirmation email only says "You may have purchased a 'special fare.'"

I'm done with American, I think. Every single flight I've taken out of Tokyo has been delayed. I don't know what it is with them and Tokyo.
My outbound flight this time got me stuck in the June 19 cluster.... at Chicago. Hours in delay and about a dozen gate changes had us running through the airport. I'm not the type to ask for compensation, but they proactively sent me 3K miles. My previous flight from Tokyo in March also had about 4 hours delay AND lost baggage, but no compensation miles. Flight before that was also delayed at Christmas.

This, and also "if you had travel insurance use it!" are frankly useless victim blaming comments.

People on flyertalk typically buy dozens of tickets, and I'm sure no one is sitting around reading the entire fare rules or buying insurance for every single trip (and this seams like a fairly standard roundtrip US-Asia which no one typically would read the entire rules or get insurance for - its not an expensive safari or antarctic cruise).

In general, people understand that tickets are non-refundable, and that they might have to pay a change fees with fare-difference to make the change. Outside of basic economy tickets which are spelt out (not the case here), there is no reasonable expectation that you wouldn't be able to pay a change fee to make the change.

OP, you can probably wait to see if there is a schedule change by AA, and use that to request a change? I think the main problem is that the cost-center went through Japan so the japanese agents can be the only ones who can make changes to the tickets, and not AA in US. You might want to keep trying talking to the japanese agents (and if you're in tokyo itself, drop by their office).

Yes T&C can be found if you click the appropriate tab and in some cases read through pages of small type When I purchase a ticket on aa.com, at the very end there is a box which must be clicked noting that you agree to all the rules and conditions--I wonder how many pax DO read the rules.
After purchasing you can see the flt conditions by going to the refund page--but not actually requesting a refund..

I got burned by this exact same thing on a CPH-RDU roundtrip about 10 years ago. This was way before basic economy or any of the cheap TATL LCCs were around, I too had no idea such a restrictive fare existed. At that point it turned out that the lowest fare code (either O or N, don't remember) on ex-Denmark fares didn't allow any changes at all. Live and learn.

It was funny, in my example the original ticket was around $900, and the change fee and fare difference for the potential change (to move to exact same flight 1 day earlier) was around an extra $1000 that AA wouldn't take from me. I flew on the original ticket and AA missed out on an extra $1k of revenue.

Any idea if I'll still earn my miles for the return flight? Or are they forfeit? :/
They said there would be no "cancellation fee."

If you don't fly it you won't earn it.

This whole thing is so upsetting.

AA was selling non-changeable/nonrefundable tickets UK-USA maybe ten years ago. They certainly preceded the U.S. Basic Economy move.