Blumie

I purchased my daughter a J ticket BOS-LHR for next weekend. She has decided to shorten her trip slightly, so I investigated the cost of changing the return to a few days earlier. Searching on the app, I was being quoted a cheapest price of $303 to change the reservation, which seemed reasonable to me given that it would be more than offset by hotel cost savings. But the app would not sell it to me. Each time I tried, it would get to the finish line, including taking my credit card info, and then produce an error message. I tried my phone and laptop, and different credit cards, multiple times; no luck. So I had to call AA.

When I got my callback after 45 minutes, I explained to the agent the change that I was trying to make and the error I was receiving from the app. She plugged in the new flight info and said she could make the change without cost. I didn’t get the sense she was doing me a favor —- I suspect they don’t have the authority to do that — but just that’s what the system was showing her. Five minutes later I had a confirmation email of the change, and had saved $303. Not bad!

njvandy

Congrats, that's a nice win. I wonder if there was some sort of pending schedule change in process at the time you were trying to change it. That would explain the error and also give the agent the flexibility to make a change without penalty.

Blumie

I doubt there was a pending schedule change, but there had been a significant schedule change in December (and an insignificant one in February), so I did think that could’ve been a factor.

Stripe

I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago rebooking a Hawaii trip for my wife. The web site offered options to change but it kept erroring out near the end of the process. I could see the alternate flights were available so I called. The agent was able to make the change and the additional fare collection was hundreds of dollars less than the web site quoted.

Dave Noble

Was perhaps the error due to a discrepency in the amount quoted and the amount due being detected at final payment stage?

Blumie

No idea, but I don’t recall experiencing that before. Many of us have had issues booking a quoted fare only to get a message when trying to pay indicating that the fare is no longer available, but that’s not the message I was getting.

VegasGambler

If you have a schedule change of more then a few hours the agents have wide leeway to rebook you. Although I always thought there was a +/- 1 day limit to that.

Dave Noble

Looking at the fares on BOS-LHR, the cheapest fares have no change penalty. If changing only the inbound , then as long as the same booking class was available, there shouldn't be any fare difference. I suspect that the mobile application was incorrectly looking at fares for being issued now rather than historical ones and that this was picked up when validated at the credit card time

xliioper

There can be substantial fare differences if you have purchased roundtrip fares with minimum stay requirements and change the return so that you no longer meet min stay requirements of original fares. There can also be fare differences due to different fares having day of travel requirements. In particular, there are cheaper fares available for inbound travel from EU on Mon-Thu vs Fri-Sun. For BOS-LHR route, there would be a fare difference of $150 if you had a Mon-Thu return fare and changed to Fri-Sun return (assuming you still meet min stay requirements, and there is bucket availability for these cheaper fares which are I fares). If you are just changing return, they will look at AP from original booking date and you can still qualify for cheaper I fares as long as other requirements are met (like min stay) and there is I bucket availability. The cheapest I fares on BOS-LHR look to have 3 day min-stay requirements.

Dave Noble

Given that the passenger is travelling this weekend and then returning on the 2nd april, then it would seem unliikely that a minimum stay requirement was not being met - that the agent made the change for no fee would be a very strong indicator to me that the suggested charge of $300 by the mobile application was incorrect