Antarius

Before booking it says "check to agree with the CoC and the Refund policy". In the latter, it says under Refunds

Refunds of taxes

You can request a refund of eligible taxes included in the ticket price. If eligible, we'll refund the original form of payment.

• Destination-specific taxes not imposed by us may be eligible
• Taxes we must pay whether you travel are not eligible

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I don't believe there's much of a case to be made here.
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I agree that it's hidden, much like most of AA's stuff. Fortunately for the OP, it's only 10 bucks and not a lot more.

chessman

Is that specifically for refundable fares or is it the general language even for non refundable tickets? If the latter it could be harder for AA to rely on when it's advertising fully refundable fares without any caveats.

Centurion

OP should contact the atty in this forum who has successfully filed action on similar matters. It’s not the $10 it’s the point of it.

ijgordon

To be fair, the FARE is being fully refunded. The tax is not part of the fare. And I guess that’s covered in the CoC.
I don’t know how the regulators will come out on this, probably best case is to force better disclosure of taxes that are not refundable (and we know how bad AA is at disclosures, how they bury the link to the fare rules until right before purchase.)

mvoight

Why would you expect AA to pay a NONREFUNDABLE DR tax?
Why should AA be out of pocket on this?

ezefllying

The argument is that AA makes a big deal of marketing these tickets as fully refundable, giving a reasonable person the impression that what you put in is what you can get back. Because they market that, the argument goes, they should either be equally clear that some of that payment isn't actually refundable, or they should just have to eat it. In short, the argument is that they took on the risk through their misleading marketing.

As you can see, I am taking no position on whether the argument is correct, and I'm definitely not offering any thoughts on whether any court or government agency would agree with it.

Antarius

I agree that it is misleading.

Unfortunately, that's the name of the game for airlines. The headline banner fare sounds good, but it comes with a paralegal's worth of paperwork.

Of all the questionable practices we've seen over the years (flexible vs fully flexible, wonky fare rules, business mileage tickets that have the majority in economy buried inside), IMO, this isn't that big of one or unreasonable. If AA doesn't get the money back, they can't give it back to you.

That said, to give AA props here - the refunds page is a delight to read compared to their fare rules. It's clearly organized, easy to read AND NOT IN ALL CAPS. It took me a few seconds to find the quoted para in my post a few up.

dhuey

Seems like you solved the mystery, and AA comes out okay with not refunding funds it doesn’t hold.

eyeballer

Question is, when does AA itself have to pay the tax? Do they pay the DR govt as soon as a ticket is issued, or just prior to passengers arriving? This tax used to be collected directly from the passengers upon arrival in DR.

CharlotteYork

Can you ask AA for a courtesy credit, even if they won't refund the $10?

jmastron

That's my question too -- does AA really turn over $10 as each advance booking is made, and are they required by DR law to do so or is that just their accounting convenience? And either way, they simply shouldn't be allowed to claim "fully refundable" if it isn't. If they really want to make specific components of the advertised price nonrefundable, they need to call that out -- and if I were the DOT, I'd require the specific items and amounts to be called out explicitly on the booking screen right next to the pricing and "fully refundable" wording, as they apply to that booking, not as a generic disclaimer.

Putting a generic disclaimer in the CoC and even detailed fare rules is not sufficient -- it's one thing for fine print to clarify something that isn't stated either way in an ad; it's quite another to try to use fine print to directly contradict the clear booking screen wording. It's pretty nonstandard around the world for taxes not to be tied to, and refundable with, a specific purchase. Imagine if you returned an unopened widget to Home Depot and they tried to claim that they weren't going to refund the sales tax part. Yes, they have to do accounting for it, but that's their job.

tl;dr: I would file a DOT complaint regardless; let the regulators sort out with AA whether this is acceptable or not.

VegasGambler

Because they didn't disclose it at booking time.

carlosdca

I was wondering exactly the same thing.
It appears from the posts above that the $10 tourist tax is imposed by the Dominican Republic.
So when does AA pay the DR gov?

donotblink

I wonder what AA does when they cancel your flight due to weather/operational reasons and you chose not to get rebooked. Are you out the $10?

seawolf

Probably unless DR government has an exclusion for that. Looks to be a money grab by DR government. It appears one use to pay on arrival.

There is no DOT requirements for this. The fare portion was fully refunded. I fully expect DOT to NOT take this up as an enforcement action. They’ll open a case with AA upon receiving a complaint and AA may just address it as a courtesy refund but no violation of US regulations.