Ticket Reissue
 

Just a quick question about RTW reissues. My ticket was originally purchased towards the end of the year last year. When I had it reissued once they didn't change the stamp to show that it had to be used by the date I purchased it on last year. So now it has an april expiration date. Did I get a way with a few extra months to use my ticket?

Very interesting - my gut tells me you lucked out. Given that the reservation certainly doesn't have a "not valid after" date, and the ticket is the only place that has the "not valid after" date (column with a date for each segment), if your ticket has a new April date instead of the original Dec date then there is nothing to say you need to use your ticket by Dec 05. I may be wrong, but if not we should all find out who re-issued your ticket ;)

If it's an OWE the expiration is one year after first flight, not purchase date. If you began using it in April, the agent did the right thing. If on the other hand it now shows an expiry more than a year after first flight, it may seem as if you have an extension, which you could use at some risk. Cowardly me would not.

(I had the opposite error - a BA agent reissued showing purchase date as expiry. When I pointed out her error, she, not wanting to do the tickets again, put it off as nothing. And true enough, when it came time to fly the segments beyond that incorrect date (for which I had been holding confirmed reservations, but changed them as the event approached) there was no problem.)

I had a similar situation in which QF reissued a OWE (originally ticketed by AA)four months after the initial flight. QF put an expiration date of 12 months from the date of reissue, thereby extending the ticket by four months. I talked with a good friend at AA on my chances of using the ticket beyond its original expiration date. The answer: If any of the flight segments booked beyond the correct expiration date required a reissue then AA at least, would almost certainly catch the error. Since the reissue reconstructs the ticket from its first flight, its a very easy error to catch. If however, you are booking reservations beyond the correct expiration date on open segments which would not require a reissue then who knows?

Based on this advice, and a willingness to abide by the rules anyway, I certainly made no attempt to use the ticket outside its legal validity window.

There is no such thing as a quick question, or at least no such thing as a quick and accurate answer, with regard to RTW ticket issues.

I don't have an answer, only an opinion, echoing what has been said here not so long ago: the more we take advantage of some agent's mistake, the harder it will be, and the longer it will take, for all of us to have our tickets reissued in future, and if that agent is ever held acountable for his error, please, Mr. Murphy, let it not be my misfortune to find him on duty when I show up to have my ticket reissued.

Yes agents do make mistakes as they have to do the ticket reissue and recalculating by hand. The computer certainly won't be filling in the blanks.

If you got away with it, fine. But don't draw attention by putting it here... this is one of the reasons why all the Oneworld alliance wants to implement e-ticketing. So that this sort of ticketing error doesn't happen.