New schedule changes/ refunds policy for tickets pch 8 April 2020 or after
 

American Airlines announced that they would no longer provide refunds for schedule changes that results in take offs or arrivals that are less than four hours from what was originally scheduled. They will waive the change fee for rebooking and this does not effect existing tickets. Big negative for me imo.

No surprise here with the massive number of schedule changes coming out where trunk routes are going from something like 10-12x daily to 2-3x daily. The name of the game right now is conserving cash.

For flights booked after Apr 8 only

The 61 minute rule on refunds for schedule changes for non-refundable tickets was written in the CoC. This can only apply for tickets purchased after this change as AA is changing the contract.

I put in a for a refund yesterday for an itinerary that was booked last October. The outbound was 2 hours later. The return was now 6 hours later. I assume that it would qualify even under the new rules since the return was more than 4 hours later...I called to cancel and ask for a refund but was told I'd have to go online about the refund. The email I received about the refund request said I can go online after 24 hours and check on the status, but it shows nothing when I put in the ticket number there. The last time I needed to ask for a refund (October 2019) the phone agent cancelled the reservation for me & put through the request for the refund...
I also had a flaky itinerary booked as an award ticket in June to Seattle. It was JAX-DFW-SAN-SEA with SAN-SEA on Alaska. The AA flights JAX-DFW-SEA disappeared and only SAN-SEA remained. The earliest JAX-DFW flight was many hours later so there is now no way to get to SAN before the SEA flight leaves. I asked for a refund of my miles and they were returned to my account overnight with no fee to redeposit them.

I don't think that AA suggests otherwise. The updated COC seems to be fairly clear.

1. The new COC do not affect your ticket as they, by their own terms, only apply to new tickets. You were and remain eligible for a refund if you wish.
2. You should be able to go online and make this request. It may take a day to adjust. But, in any event, if you are still unable tomorrow, send AA a note requesting a refund to your original form of payment and if you do not have a confirmation from AA that it has initiated the refund within 7 days, file a chargeback with your credit card issuer (bank).

Did you put in a refund request at prefunds.aa.com? If you didn't, then nothing will ever show under the status for it and you'll never get a refund. Once you cancel the ticket, you MUST put the refund request in at that site on your own (an agent cannot do this for you unless you have some type of disability preventing you from doing so). I've already done this for tickets with schedule changes and have not had an issue getting a full refund to my credit card.

I thought I read in another thread that the DOT requires refunds for schedule changes more than 2 hours. Is this incorrect?

This isn't true (at least as of ~2-3 weeks ago). I put in a refund request via the EXP phone line, it never showed up on prefunds refund status page during the review period, but once it was approved it showed up and I received my money 4 days later.

This as per post 8

I called Sunday to cancel an AA booking (due to schedule changes) and the agent was very good in explaining the process and giving me the website address to get my cash back.

It took less than a minute to do that. No mess no fuss and really easy (and no need to get your credit card involved creating more work for everyone and further delaying peoples refunds)


Personally I aways thought a change of 61 minutes generating a refund was a pretty generous polict.

if you’re making weekend getaway plans, need to be in the office until 5 and book an 8pm flight, they can switch you to a 4pm flight and not offer a refund, which seems pretty unreasonable—this could cause someone to need to use an extra vacation day.

COC history
 

does anyone know how you might go find the conditions of carriage that were effective when your ticket was purchased? Americans seems to only have the current ones on their website and their Twitter agents deny the existence of history.

From one site: The DOT’s enforcement notice pushes back against such airline efforts. The department stated that it considers any contract of carriage provision by an airline that denies refunds for cancellations or significant schedule changes to be a regulatory violation. (The DOT does not specifically define “significant schedule change.” A DOT spokesperson said it is determined on a case-by-case basis.) The notice applies to both U.S. and foreign carriers that operate in the U.S.

It's not the CoC but hopefully it helps a bit. (pre 4/8 guidelines)

https://saleslink.aa.com/en-US/docum...funds_Only.pdf