It reduced the cost by about SGD 150 in L and much more in D. Funny, you'd think the taxes wouldn't be that disparate.

Paper tickets? I thought we were in the 21st century!
Will they post the tickets to me then, or do I collect them from the airport? AA doesn't fly to SIN as far as I know.

I'll give CX a call tomorrow to find out more re open-dated e-tickets and charges, thanks for that bit of info.

They don't have to fly somewhere to have an office there. AA doesn't fly to Australia, yet has an office in BNE.
AA SIN phone number 65 6622 1291

Date changes
 

I am half way through a D OWE ticket. I need to change some dates, not route, but AA say that they can't, even though the next flights are on AA. After pressing they said they could reissue the whole ticket as it's not on their stock, for a fee. Is this true?

I always thought that date and time changes were straight forward and could be done with the next carrier.

(Note, it was the AA call centre in Cape Town, if that makes any difference).

Thanks.

I'm on DONE4 ticketed by BA and changed date on an AA-flight. Did it at the first class check-in desk and it took about 30minutes as the agent needed to "reissue the whole ticket" instead of simply changing the flight. I don't know what she did exactly, but the whole thing was free as it is supposed to be.

I can see now in MMB in BA.com that the earlier flight shows cancelled and another flight is added (with new date).

Also trying to decipher some of the tax/fee code from the online booking tooling. I did a simple KRT-AMM-LHR-JFK-EZE-JFK-SYD-FRA-AMM-KRT in biz class.

Of the $1,437 total tax/fees the big/odd codes are:
Jordan Embarkation Tax 113.02 USD
Tax description unavailable (YRVB) 500.00 USD
Airline Fuel Surcharge 175.00 USD
Tax description unavailable (SDEM) 328.40 USD

Did not know about the Jordan Tax, but what the heck is YRVB? I guessing that the SDEM is a % of the total ticket price since the prior LONEx example is about 50% of the DONEx price. Any way to track these odd codes?

My understanding is that the Y* tax codes are airline fees. I would think that YR charge is fuel.

So, I made a booking through the AA RTW desk, but the agent told me that the Rates desk might reject it as it doesn't contain any AA flights.

This is despite me telling them that the first leg (SIN-HKG) is an AA codeshare even though the plane belongs to CX. Is there any way around this? The itinerary they have sent me shows the carrier as CX. This whole process is getting quite frustrating.

As a rule, codeshare flight numbers are only applied in cases where either (a) the flight terminates or ends in the home country of the codeshare partner, or (b) the flight connects from or to a flight actually operated by the codeshare airline, or, in the case of SIN-HKG, it connects to another AA codeshare, in this case possibly HKG-LAX/SFO/ORD/JFK.

It's long been the case that AA sometimes won't ticket xONExs that don't include either an AA flight or code, but that "rule" seems to be applied haphazardly. It's yet another mystery of airline tariff departments, the practitioners of which mostly attended Hogwarts.

This whole thing would be moot if Oneworld's vendor simply fixed its buggy booking tool so that it didn't have a seizure at the last minute under so many circumstances. I've written to Oneworld about this (using their extremely limited feedback channels) and have gotten answers that are halfway between bupkis and happytalk.

It's helpful when planning such flights to look at the AA timetable, which makes a clear distinction between "operated by codeshare airlines" and "operated by codeshare airlines, connection required." While the codeshare typically won't exist unless it has a logical connection to an AA coded or operated flight, you don't actually need to connect to that flight to book the AA code if it is in the former category. For example, AA5870 (JL) HKG-HND can be booked as a standalone flight.

Does anyone know how long it takes for a ticket to be rated? My booking says it's on hold until 16 Sep, after which it will automatically be cancelled, however 24 hours have passed since I made the booking, with only 24 hours to go until the deadline, and still no sign of a rating.

Does the ratings desk even work on weekends? If they don't, I might have to book with another carrier - was hoping to get an AA ticket to reduce surcharges though.

Well, finally got my quote back from AA, a mere 12 hours before the ticketing deadline. Shockingly it was horrendously expensive compared to the quote I got from the online tool, about AUD6000 more, so I didn't go for it. Good news is I'm finally ticketed through CX now.

It's been a good, if steep, learning experience for me - thank you to all who replied, keep up the good work.

Last year, the AA desk returned a quote for an AONE3 when I was booking a DONE3...

Quick question I can't find an answer to - if I use the Middle East exception to start and end in different cities do I have to count a surface segment between the origin and destination as part of my 16 segments. The online tool is trying to do so but Mileage Monkey validates the routing.

There isn't anything in the rules saying you have to.
It's the same rule that allows me to start a xONE4 in CBR and end it in MEL, I don't have to count MEL-CBR as a segment.