Reinstating DONE cancelled segments
 

I am in the middle of a DONE5 booked through AA. I went to "My Reservations" on aa.com today, my booking was missing which I thought was odd, so then I pulled it by PNR and it showed "CANCELED". I started to panic and called the AA RTW desk and asked for the agent I always work with. She said the record history shows that I canceled the reservation last night on AA.com, and while I did cancel a couple of reservations I had on hold, I am pretty sure I didn't cancel the RTW trip. I am still shocked that this can even happen, but what can I do at this point...

There's 2 of us travelling together and the other record is intact.

I have 10 segments left (out of the original 20), and the AA agent was able to get everything back except for 2 segments that no longer have D availability:

1. JFK-SYD AA7366 (QF108) F3A3Z0P0J9C0D0I0U0 This is part of a transit from South America SCL-JFK-SYD.
2. DUR-CPT BA6312 (operated by Comair) J9C0D0I0Y9B0... There are 5 other friends of mine booked on this flight (all in economy except my RTW partner) which is the only one that day. We were all booked on a later flight which was canceled and merged with this flight, which explains the low availability. The seat map shows only 1 seat assigned in business (my partner) and 8 in economy (4 of which are from my party).

I am now waitlisted for both of these flights. First flight is in mid December, second one in early January.

I called BA RTW to see if they could do anything with the Comair flight since I was holding a confirmed seat the night before and they said no, because it's a codeshare flight.

The AA RTW agent sent a message the the "oneworld lead" to see if they can do anything about the QF flight, but I won't hear back until Monday.

Worst case I guess I could take DUR-CPT on my own the following day, but I am not sure about what I can do with SCL-JFK-SYD at this point. I am hoping that Qantas comes back with good news next week, but if not, can I take the following day's JFK-SYD flight? This would give me a 36 hour transit in NYC which is not allowed. I can't get on another LAX-SYD flight because I have no more segments. Another option would be to move both our flights back one day SCL-JFK-SYD, but if we do that we'd give up seats on our current flights (SCL-JFK is only J5 at this point, and of course my friend's seat on JFK-SYD) not to mention, spending one less day in SYD.

Anyone have any suggestions?

First of all, I'm sorry for you.

Any chance of re-routing SCL-LAX-SYD?

Good suggestion. There is availability on the early LAX-SYD flight (the "day" flight) and SCL-LAX is ok as well. When we originally booked the tickets, we booked the connection in JFK for the extra 2000 miles (3000 AA EQP) which barely put both of us at EXP. The direct SCL-SYD (which amazingly has D under the QF codeshare for that day) would mean missing EXP. There's been additional travel this year, so we could be OK with a reroute through LAX, but it would be very close. Also, I know a reissue would involve fees of $125 x 2, but would we also get slammed with additional fuel surcharges?

Thanks for your help.

As part of a formal reissue, yes, but according to the AA board AA has a history of phantom cancelations on aa.com, so if you are absolutely certain that you did not cancel it yourself then I would press for a fee-free reissue, all done via some supervisor, of course. What I mean is that if the AA board is to believed then AA *knows* that their system does this every now and then, and if so they are, perhaps, likely to look at it in a positive, customer relations way. It would not be the first time they have waived all fees/rules for me, albeit not for this exactly.

Edit: another suggestion for AA that could work, and it is well within their power to do, if you persuade them and they so wish: AA takes your JFK-SYD coupon and exchanges it for one two-segment e-ticket JFK-LAX + LAX-SYD. They have done something very similar for me.

There is 0 chance of D inventory opening up on JFK-SYD. They save it for oversells when it is down to 0 and some cancels occur. Your best bet is to reroute SCL-LAX-SYD or even SCL-SYD (which is a more comfortable trip, fwiw). I guess your other choices are what Viajero has suggested, or to buy a surface segment (JFK-LAX). You have to have a legal transit in NA, which means less than 24 hours (and in the past surface segments were also not allowed, as they were considered to be a stopover).

The cancel button is quite potent on aa.com, I've canceled a few reservations by mistake when my mouse missed by 1, and the confirmation screen before the cancel is really not useful (as it doesn't provide the routing to identify your reservation). I've learned to name all my reservations on aa.com rather than leaving it the system generated name, which helps a bit with this problem. I've never seen Sabre make a mistake in the history of the reservation, so I'm sure it was from your computer.

But RTW reservations have that option disabled, right? (mine do).

This flight is not oversold, so I don't agree with the zero chance of D opening up. Right now it is showing F3A3Z0P0J9C0D0I0U0Y9B9H9K9 and I have seen D inventory open up in cases like this many times before.
I was able to replicate what I think happened to my reservation using someone else's account (didn't want to play with mine anymore!)

• Put reservation 1 on hold DCA-DFW
• Put reservation 2 on hold LAX-SFO
• Open reservation 2 back up, hit cancel
• Cancellation Notice comes up saying "Are you sure you want to cancel the selected reservation?"
• I forgot about that screen and opened other tabs in Firefox.
• Eventually I open up reservation 1 (DCA-DFW)
• Close that tab
• Go back to the other tab that has the cancellation notice and absolutely no details about what I am canceling.
• Click Yes.
• Go back to My Reservations.
• Reservation 1 and not 2 is canceled.

It wouldn't matter if I had my reservations named, and like Viajero said, you cannot name reservations that are not made on AA.com.

Trust me, I have dealt many times with QF about QF108 availability and sometimes have had to buy F as there was no way to get A (and QF does guarantee seat on oversold flights to WPs, but not in A). You might get lucky, but without QF status this particular flight is difficult in both A and D (other QF flights are much easier). Month end and quarter end are particularly bad, so I guess the date of your flight also affects the chances a fair bit. But be aware that QF108 has special yield rules (due to extensive F and J last-minute travel between JFK and SYD due to certain Australian companies having split operations between these cities).

Great summary! ^

Unfortunately, most of the web sites are not designed for tabbed browsing. They only recognize one session from your computer. Therefore, when you click on cancel in step 9, it cancels the most recent itinerary opened in step 6. :td: From AA computer record, you did cancel yourself. :(

If you must access the same web site using another screeen, you should use a different browser. I use both IE and FF precisely for this purpose. This doesn't help you now but hope it will help in the future.

Which of course is horrible web form design. If the cancel confirmation form is submitted at a later point when the latest viewed reservation for the session has changed, it should return an error rather than canceling the wrong reservation. This can easily be done by including a hidden field containing a reference id to the reservation that the cancel confirmation page was loaded for, or keeping a more detailed track of activity on the server-side.

Well, I am very happy to report that Qantas opened up D inventory for me for QF108 (which was showing J9C0D0 and now shows J8C0D0). Lost my seat assignment (they say the seat map is closed because they've reached 80% assignments), but I am not really worried about that.

The BA/Comair flight is still waitlisted, but that's not as big of a deal right now.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Another update... BA6312 (operated by Comair) DUR-CPT cleared as well, and went from J9C0D0I0Y9B0 to J9C9D9I2Y9B9H9K9M3R9L0 at the same time. No outside intervention there (unlike the QF108 clearing), the request just cleared on its own.