I just had a very strange experience trying to book an AA award ticket on Royal Air Maroc. The routing was showing availability online, but seemed like it might be phantom (wouldn't let me complete the booking process). So I rang AA's call centre in Germany, pressed the number for AAdvantage, and got put on hold for 10 minutes, before the line suddenly rang once and transferred me straight to Iberia's Portuguese call centre (in Portuguese). Not sure how that happens, but anyway, I hung up and called back, connected to general reservations, and asked for someone who could book me an AAdvantage ticket over the phone.

The general reservations agent put me on hold for a while and then suddenly someone picked up and didn't say anything for a while. When I asked if anyone was there, I got a "yeah, who's this?" Once I explained the issue and that I'd like to book a ticket by phone, he proceeded to try to make me troubleshoot the website, saying that the availability showed for him until he gets to the login page. Of course, the issue was only after login, so I informed the agent of this and asked him to look up the availability in his reservations system. tHe said "well no, I can't login, since American Airlines employees aren't allowed to login." I then asked him if he was actually the reservations department, and he said "yes, reservations and web team." I asked if he could then book the flight on my behalf with my miles, and he said "no, since I can't login to your account - you need to do that online."

After that, I asked him if he was seriously telling me that it is not possible to book an AAdvantage ticket anywhere but the website, at which point he said "oh, well I'd need to login to my system then." After he got in there, we had a long go around of him explaining that it needed to be a multi-city ticket, since I wanted a layover at CMN. I told him, no, it was a one way with a connection, and we went back and forth for a while, before he finally agreed to put it through as a one way. After that, he tried again and couldn't book it, so told me that the problem was the stop at CMN: "if you're flying to Africa, you always need to stop in Europe first. No way around it." So I asked him to look at just MIA-CMN direct instead, and he said "no, same issue - there's no way to do that either, you'd have to stop in Europe first to get to CMN now." At this point, I decided it was hopeless, so I asked to be disconnected so that I could call back later. I would have liked to answer the survey, but after staying silent for a few minutes, he simply transferred me to another agent (probably to avoid that). The new agent started off equally as confused, before eventually just saying that she couldn't see the availability because I was holding it online. Despite having received the error message and 3 seats still showing up in the search.

I assume it is then phantom availability after all, but I'll try again tomorrow to confirm. But what a weird series of phone interactions...

About par for the course these days, unfortunately.

Are you sure you started with a genuine AA number? Could you have googled and gotten a number for some scam travel service pretending to be AA service?

But where was the scam? The agent apparently had no interest in the OP's AA or CC info.

Nope, it was the number directly from AA.com. Though I like the idea of a phone scam that's only mission is to waste as much of the caller's time as possible, for no financial gain of their own.

Sounds like my father, when he receives such calls.

I had a similar experience Monday morning. Wasn't even sure I'd been connected to an actual agent.

One can only hope that someone is actually reviewing the tapes of these (presumably) newly minted trainee calls & providing constructive feedback and additional counseling/training as warranted. That's probably far too much to hope for though.

Lol - it's a nice thought, but as you said at the end... doubtful. I got 3 completely useless ones on Sunday - one who didn't know what a systemwide upgrade was, one who said upgrading was not something AA did at all and one who was completely stumped by the NATO phonetic alphabet and couldn't look anything up. When you're so cheap that you pay less than McDonald's.... well, this is what you get.

I feel bad for the people on the phone. It's not their fault that they are completely incompetent - if the count of repeat incidents is greater than 1 then it's a management failure.

OP you could be contacting someone working from home. The job performance metrics have them penalized for call handoffs

This is making me happy to be on hold with ANA and their reassuring "Your call will be handled in Japan or the USA" phone menu preamble lol.

AA has a lot of terrible agents in the US. So, not sure what your point is (unless you think American Airlines should fully outsource their call centers to Japan)

Out of curiosity what time did you call AA? I find that calls before 9PM CST tend to get handled way better than an outsourced call center.

My suggestion would be to just call AA reservations and make the award booking that way. Good luck!

I had a similar experience speaking with an AAdvantage customer rep while I was attempting to have my purchased 500-mile upgrades converted to miles instead of LPs. I had received an e-mail from AAdvantage with an offer of 65,000 miles for my purchased upgrades....but checking my account, I discovered AA had already converted all of my upgrades, both purchased and complimentary, to LPs. After discussing this situation with her, the AAdvantage rep then placed my call on hold for about 45 minutes while she attempted to get an answer from her supervisor. Judging by the accent of the rep, I suspect she was not located in the US. She finally got back to me with a response of "We're working on it" but sounded quite befuddled.

The day that the automatic conversation happened I place a call to the AAdvantage customer service number around 1 PM CST and my rep said we have to fill out some form but you will receive an email from us with 4 options and noted that AA was only converting paid 500-mile certs. The call lasted around 5 minutes total. For reference, their options arrived in an email on July 27, 2022 and got my miles in my account yesterday. So, it a timely process time, but it sounds like they may have hopefully found the template to kick off to the apportiate team. Good luck, just for reference my choices offered are below.

A. 750 Loyalty Points (250 Loyalty Points x 3 purchased 500-mile
upgrades)
B. 15,000 AAdvantage� bonus miles (5,000 bonus miles x 3 purchased
500-mile upgrades)
C. Travel Voucher of $120.00 (the paid amount associated with your 3
purchased 500-mile upgrades)
D. Refund of $120.00 to the original form of payment or check depending
on when your upgrades were purchased

Sounds like the janitor picked up a ringing phone. I would have hung up. You can tell pretty quickly if an agent doesn't have a clue.