I'm in the middle of an RTW that I need to get reissued. I patiently waited til I had flown to CMB, knowing that requires a paper ticket. At this point, I have 9 segments remaining. I had Emeco contact the rate desk, and thought I had it set up for an easy reissuance.

I was shocked to go to the San Diego Airport last night and be told (after 2 hours conferring with the rate desk) that the ticket has to be handwritten. No one was able to do it, so I was sent home.

I subsequently sent a note to Emeco, who had Dublin do the repricing. I also called the AA RTW desk today. All assure me it must be handwritten.

"Please note that Dublin is unable to build the reissue mask for a ticket over 16 segments as in the reissue mask the flown and unflown segments are counted, information is still too much for mask to handle and that is why the ticket will need to be handwritten."

I am to return to SAN today as there are people on the day shift who know how to handwrite tickets.

Is this a change in policy? In the past, I've gotten computer generated tickets on reissuing, and in fact, raved about how fast the experience was.

IIRC:

One trick they can use to shrink your itinerary to fit in the mask is to use the YY indicator (all carriers, all routes).

For example, if the first six segments of your ticket were:

LIS BA LHR BA DXB BA LHR BA JNB CX HKG (followed by 15 other segments, to equal 20)

They could re-write your itinerary as:

LIS YY HKG (followed by 15 other segments, to equal 16).

This only works provided you've flown the first segments, which your OP says you have. They should be able to get Sabre to automatically re-issue it by using this trick.

checkerboard, I wish I had read your tip before heading to the San Diego Airport the second time.

Chapter 2
I arrived during the prescribed window of time when an agent was working who knows how to handwrite tickets. She had been advised by her colleague who worked with me last night that I would likely be back, and also knew of this morning's phone call from the AA RTW desk. She had already worked for 2 hours in an attempt to issue the ticket.

Now the problem is insufficient ticket stock. They have 3 coupon books, each good for 4 flight segments. They need 4, though I can't figure out why as I have 9 unflown segments and 3 open jaws (LHR/LGW/LHR for instance).

She has taken my ticket and promises me a call when it is ready to pick up.

I think what happened was that the fare calculation won't fit into the fare construction box. The fare construction box has a fix length limit for ATB2 tickets. It doesn't matter if some of the segments have been flown, the fare contruction box still must show the complete itinerary.

This is becoming more of a problem now with more and more surcharges and taxes cramed into that box. Yes, it could be manually edited to shrink a little, but just a little. You are stuck if that still won't fit and it must be handwritten.

Each surface segment needs a throw-away coupon. By your description, you should need 12 coupons which is 3 books. I don't know why they need four.

My guess: the agent messed a book when writing.

Tell them to omit the spaces when typing up the fare calculation (I know it will be hard to read)...

During my last reissue (19 segments) about 18 months ago, the AA agent did want to try that trick to avoid the handwritten ticket. She spent about 20 minutes conferring with many desks, but the upshot is that you can't do that.

Also, FWIW, using city indicators (LON, PAR, NYC, etc.) can sometimes save a coupon, if you're flying into one airport and out of another.

For example:

MIA AA LGA // JFK CX HKG (three coupons {two segments, one surface})

could be written as:

MIA AA NYC CX HKG (two coupons {two segments}).

Sometimes, it's necessary to ticket segments like this open-dated, then sticker the reservation afterwards.

This trick once saved me several hours of waiting for a ticket that would have had to be hand-written otherwise.

And you will get to pay the taxes twice if you fly through an AA station where they've been taught to charge you if they can't be sure you've already paid.

OTOH an AAgent at ONT did just that for me. It ended up fitting the box and the tickets printed, but no one could make sense of her results and I subsequently got dinged for taxes I probably paid at two AA stations.

Not that they walk on water, but Cathay seems to know how to run an airline in many ways - their answer to the calc line ex CMB was to print it on plain paper, run 20 reduced-size copies, trim each one to the size of the box, and glue them to the coupons.

LOL ^ That's a good one.

I wonder why the GDS doesn't have the capability to print in smaller fonts.

Sabre (at least the travel agent version) can do so on ATB stock.

(I think there are only two font sizes).

For long itineraries, the fare calculation automatically prints in smaller font. But then the the length of the fare calculation line is limited by the system intself.

Well, that's what the agent did, but only 1 copy for each book of 4 coupons. Still did not matter as LAN charged me for a departure tax ex-SCL on a connection.

With one copy per book, presumably informally attached (e.g. a staple) what's to keep a traveler from making up his own substitute that clearly includes SCL? Besides the unfortunate fact that the calc line is almost entirely undecipherable, to me at least. Wish I knew what it all meant so I could at least point out to the agent, "look, here's the SCL tax..."