Best airline office for reissue
 

I have to get a AONE3 ticket reissued in London. Ba charges an additional administration fee and AA needs to get the fares revalidated before issuing the new routing.

Has any FTer used other one world airline office in London and their experience will be appreciated.

The number of segments remaining is 10. I see at CX forum that CX office in London is very good.

Is it really so that even if you have flown some segments and want to change the routing for the rest of the ticket, you're still subject to new base pricing of the ticket..? I understand that the $75 fee + that taxes can change...suprise to me if the whole ticket will be repriced.

The fares do not change once you have flown some segments;but AA booking offices always refer the tickets to their central office. I dont know why. No other airline in the alliance does it.

Most AA ticket locations are at airports, where there is not even a specific ATO position. Rather than train all the check-in agents to know how to do the occasional OWE or similar exotic ticket, they depend on a central wizard. Saves lots of money, thinks some clever manager. (Apparently if the rtw desk can "see" your ticket in their computer, they can instruct the agent, and the reissue is slick as silk. If that's not the case, I'd avoid them if possible.)

Thanks for reassuring me about the rules, I always counted that we can change the route and reissue our first DONEs without the danger of being subject to base price increase after travel has commenced.

Cheers

Even before you travel, routing changes will not result in an increased base fare provided the first international segment remains unchanged.

On my first RTW, i decided to go from an AONE4 to an AONE5 after the price ex-Sweden was increased. Although I had not started flying, the base price remained the same because I did not change the date of my ARN-LHR flight.

Apparently AA cannot "see" handwritten paper tickets in their computer. My partner had to reticket (reroute) an AONE5 with only 4 segments remaining at CDG and it took the agent 90 minutes. I didn't get the full story on what went on (and I doubt I will since he's not that savvy about this stuff), but apparently the agent had to enter a lot of info into the computer, presumably to validate the new routing. And then when she went to issue the new ticket she couldn't do it as an e-ticket (even though all segments qualified) since she would have had to enter all the information again into the computer, so she just wrote it out. Wish I was there to figure out what was going on. I didn't get the sense that the agent was incompetent, but she apparently did say it's rare that she gets this type of task.

Now, I'm wondering if this process was so difficult because the prior remaining 4 segments were all open-dated, and so once the first 16 were completed, the whole PNR dropped from the system. Since AA doesn't image handwritten tickets, the RTW desk couldn't do any of the reissue "dirty work" in advance when I called to make the reservations for the new routing for him (since I'm so nice!).

Fortunately I had prepared him for a worst-case 1-2 hour delay. :)

Moral of the story -- don't do open-dated ticketing on a RTW?

My oft-told very painful reissue at LAX had no open-dated segments, but was hand-written by Emeco. It's rather disappointing to learn that when Ireland does the pricing they don't bother to save the details in an on-line data base. I suppose the programming group has an empire, and when someone asks them to put an improvement into the airline's software, their cost estimate is so high the request is dropped. Great way to go out of business in this age of the computer.

But shouldn't the complete fare calculation detail been taped to the back of each ticket and receipt in the booklet? AA in DFW ticketed my 20-segment RTW, and someone literally sat there with a pair of scissors and scotch tape and pasted 25+ copies of the printed fare calculation to the back of each handwritten ticket and receipt page. Did Emeco just not do this, thus causing the problem?

I don't know about "thus causing the problem" - the rate desk provided the numbers and imho it's stupid for them not to have made them a part of the record - but Emeco indeed did not provide any useful fare/tax calculation on or with the tickets. Nor did AA, when they reissued the tickets.

(Be reminded that when AA/LAX reissued the 19-segment ticket, instead of hand-writing it, they got the machine to issue two tickets, one with 16 segments, one with three. I don't know what will happen the next time I want to reissue that trip. Chaos, probably.)

Maybe not. I had the AA CTO in NYC doa resissue last year and they used the same trick to avoid handwriting a 20 segment AONE5. I subsequently had it reissued while I was in CAI by EMECO and they accomplished it with no problem (and delivered the ticket to my hotel).

I am about to start a 16 sector DONE4. My new TA uses Sabre, so that is the only place the entire itinerary is visible. I assume then that if I need to re-issue I am best to do that with AA rather than QF, BA or CX (the other airlines used in the itinerary).

If it is originally booked in Sabre, does that mean the AA RTW desk can see my entire itinerary and hence expedite re-issue at an AA ticket counter if necessary?

I don't know what it means for AA to "see" a ticket, but mine was booked by the rtw desk in DFW before passing the pnr to Emeco, who then got it priced and issued the ticket. Maybe "see" means they actually have a scan of it. Otherwise I can't imagine what's missing - they booked it, they priced it, then they claimed no useful knowledge of it (the rtw desk, that is).

The issue with "seeing" the entire ticket is to do with the use different GRS (Global Reservation System) by the different airlines. There are three main GRS in use, being Sabre, Armadeus and Galileo. When the ticket is constructed in one, only the portions needed by the airlines using the other systems are pushed across to the other systems.

This means that a OneWorld Explorer ticket created and issued by, say, Qantas using Armadeus may not be visible in its entirity to an AA agent using Sabre. Typicaly only the AA segments and the inbound and outbound connecting sectors are pushed across.

Similarly if the itineray is created by the AA RTW desk, it will be built in Sabre. This means a QF agent using Armadeus will not be able to see the entire reservation.

My current RTW ticket has three different reservation confirmation codes, with different ones for the QF/BA flights, CX flights and AA flights.

Since my reservation was created in Sabre by my TA, am assume an AA agent will be better able to re-issue the ticket (since they can see the entire itinerary in Sabre) rather than a QF, BA or CX agent who can probably only see portions of the journey.

I've been told by AA RTW that if the ticket is handwritten, there is not an image of it on Sabre, which means that the fare calculation/tax details are not viewable. That information needs to be read off the ticket to the tarriffs people who then has to rebuild the pricing information.