Rerouting DONE4 / ticketing issues
 

Hello FT,
First, many thanks to everyone for the incredible amounts of knowledge shared around this forum - I've been lurking and reading quite a bit!

Now, I'm planning to buy a DONE4 ex-AMM, and thus need to book it online. However, with all the taxes added to it, and me being quite late, I can't raise the limit on my credit card high enough to buy the whole ticket I'm planning with the taxes - it ends up being around 100e more than my limit.

So, the question is if I buy a shorter ticket now, and fly the first flight, I should be able to reroute it after the flight for $150 + extra taxes? Or are there other costs involved? From reading the rules, I'm thinking this is what should happen but would appreciate any sort of input on it!

Yes, no problem adding sectors after the first flight, in fact used to be quite common to issue skeleton AONEx initially and fill in the sectors later, eg. LHR-LAX-SYD-LHR for the initial ticket, to help tardy TAs or ticket desks. Now it is much less hassle to get it right the first time, plus the fees have gone up. Most airlines will charge a small convenience fee for using their airport ticket desk, or phoning, etc. so it will be maybe an extra $50 as well (depends on which airline does the reissue) but quite viable and a good solution to your problem. Though most CC will do an emergency credit limit increase to accomodate a single airline ticket purchase (I've had to go $20K over my limit in the past and it was approved in seconds, but this depends on your issuer).

Every credit card I've ever had allows you to pay money in before you make the purchase taking the account into credit and, in effect, increasing your credit limit.

Thanks christep, calling the bank showed that indeed to be the case.

However, now the booking is acting up - rtw app giving errors, the actual booking page having errors and after finalling getting through all the steps, letting me now that the fare is no longer available.. Time to retry!

Thanks for the help!

I had the same problem with my ex-RUH ticket that first heads to AMM, so was ticketed by AA for RJ as yours. Wasn't able to book online and had to have the AA RTW desk hold an itinerary for me to purchase at a ticketing desk in Canada.

If you figure out what's wrong or solve the problem that would be great as it would save me about $500 in taxes, somehow AA calculates it differently than the online tool, and a trip to Canada.

Well, after looking at the flights in question on expertflyer, it seemed the problem was the availability of D seats on one segment of the flight. After I changed it, it booked OK and I got confirmation. However, something is still not right with the reservation and it's showing as 'On request' on aa.com. Called the RTW desk and they told me it had been bounced for pricing to Dallas, and then to Dublin as the ticket originates from Europe. They gave me a number in the UK to call and will be trying that tomorrow to see what's up.

That's not untypical. Be patient.

Alright - I guess living in these times I just expect everything to happen in the blink of an eye :) Thanks for the reassurement!

I'd worry that was the problem but for the fact that AA held my reservation with all the same flights.

Well, received a mail today that the schedule has changed. Called up the European reservations in Dublin, talked with Barney who was very nice and knowledgeable, and it turned out that somehow my booking had 20 segments instead of the 16 that I had originally booked through the online tool. Of course, the reservation page on AA and the actual Amadeus booking pages never showed the 20 segments to me. Also the people at the actual RTW desk (in Dallas?) never mentioned anything about this to me.

He suspected this might've been due to the schedule changes on NRT-JFK, but I'm thinking with all the problems other people have been having as well, something is broken in the online tool. He got someone to manually fix the ticket, and hopefully it will now be ticketed soon. He also said that their systems have been really slow lately, so you might want to just keep trying to book something through there and then getting someone in AA to fix it for you as well - especially if you're also including the NRT-JFK leg.

Wonderful situation...I went up to the AA desk at YVR to pay for my ticket, of course about $500 more than the online tool, but my credit card was flagged as fraud, even though I called Capital One beforehand to authorize the transaction. On the phone with AA as they extend the hold on my reservation, I think they're on the phone with Qantas to get permission or something, but I'll try the route of multiple attempts on the online booker.

Did the person you spoke with recommend trying the same itinerary over and over again or changing dates around and then changing the ticket to the correct dates after issuing it?

Ouch, sorry to hear that :( Nope, he didnt, as it didnt really come up as I managed to get the actual booking entered through the tool. We did talk about getting confirmations from different airlines though, and he mentioned that the deadlines from the other airlines were still weeks away (my first flight is 1. march)

I did try entering the itinerary to the online tool over a few days for probably 30-40 times with changing a single flight until it did work but as changing the dates is supposedly pretty painless, it sounds like a good plan to me. The only problem is the intermittent problems the tool has before forwarding to the actual booking (illegal string format or something like that) but those seemed to fix themselves by just waiting for a few minutes and resubmitting it. I'm guessing that error results from their systems being out of capacity and the error after entering credit card details has more to do with the actual booking not being accepted for one reason or another.

Good luck!