Oh absolutely and I have mine set up for that purpose too. I got three alerts in short order from one CC a while back and it meant I was able to get the card blocked more or less instantly as someone was using it fraudulently to buy gift cards!!!

My experience is that AA will check the validity of the credit card instantly (i.e., you will get an error right away if you entered a wrong number). But AA will not charge the credit card right away, so if there is an issue with not having enough credit, etc., that would only be caught once AA tried to charge the card.

I echo the recommendation of setting up alerts for "card not present." Not only is it useful for catching fraudulent charges quickly, but it is also useful in circumstances such as this one.

I had the same issue a few weeks ago.Though I did in fact get an email instructing me to call within 24 hours. Turns out that I entered a pin number incorrectly on my gift card. It was fixed quickly and I was ticketed at original purchase price.

IMO, AA can and should validate all forms of payments at the time of purchase and let the user know immediately. Heck, Food trucks manage to do this.

Can you imagine going to Nordstrom, buying a suit, going home and then someone calls you a day later saying your payment got declined?

That is between AA's CFO and its Investor Relations people.

The customer has the obligation to present a valid form of payment and the reservation and fare are not guaranteed until that is done. It boggles to think that anyone would complain that they were given more time than AA was required to give.

Unless it causes someone's ticket to cancel, resulting in them upset and booking elsewhere. It isnt purely AA delaying payment collection.

It's objectively a dumb system to have in 2019. It only exists due to chronic underinvestment or bad decision making in IT - no one would ever build a system that does this today.

I don't want extra time to pay (and if I did, AA sells it -- in the form of a hold). I want convenience and predicability -- aka immediately knowing if my purchase was successful. Somehow, basically every other consumer-facing company manages to provide this. AA requiring hours to validate a gift card is a bug, not a feature.

How many food trucks are providing distance selling?

When done in person , AA does process things instantly in my experience

I agree that AA's ability to process payments is appalling though. Other airlines - make purchase on a website, will have payment processed and a ticket issued by time of clicking to final page in booking process

Yes - food trucks are in person, but the example was used to illustrate that even small market vendors can offer it.

Agreed. I've never encountered anyone else, let alone the world's largest anything, offer something where this can occur.

AA has improved, where ticketing now takes hours vs days, but still, in 2019, this is nuts.

So does AA in that stuation :)


I thought that when US took over AA, that this would be an area which would improve. When making award bookings with US Air, I would have tickets in email inbox before hanging up the phone with the agent to make the booking

It is a shame that the AA clunkiness remained

Had a similar experience recently. I put a reservation on hold and sent it to a client to get paid. The reservation changed to Pending but the ticket was never issued because the client's credit card was denied. I never got notification of the issue. Luckily I noticed that the ticket was stuck as Pending.

FWIW, CTAs often work the same way. When I book in Concur, it's usually 3-4 hours before the text message from the CC issuer (Amex) and the ticket being issued. If it fails, the CTA sends me an e-mail and calls. It's not just AA.

However, I agree it's ridiculous in 2019.

That’s because Concur is just sending the ticketing request to your agency, who then needs to manually issue the ticket. At least that’s how ours is set up. Concur can make the reservation live, but an agent needs to ticket it. Doesn’t matter what airline.
(And as a side note, even though I can reserve an AA and DL flight in the same PNR, when it gets to the agent, they end up separating the record because AA and DL flights can’t be ticketed together.)

I've just about given up trying to pay outright for AA tickets. I only have cards in Mexico with dynamic CVV numbers, so they change every 5 mins in the app. So when AA doesn't charge immediately, I always get an email 30 mins later saying payment has been declined. It's a genuine pain because tax deductions here require having the transaction reflected electronically. When I have to pay with a UK card, it makes the whole tax deduction process a nightmare.

Is it really 2023?