oneworld revolved, then wobbled around us
 

So, due to our own stupidity and carelessness my parents and I were too late to check in for our MXP-BUD MA flight and had to change our tickets.

I was on a oneworld visit Europe fare issued on AA paper, whilst the parents were on a regular one way fare issued by QF as etickets. In theory, any oneworld alliance member is able to issue tickets on behalf of another oneworld alliance partner. You know... "Should you require any assistance, please approach one of our ground staff or alternatively, any of our oneworld alliance partners." and all that. We soon found out that yes oneworld attempts to revolve around you, but in a rather wobbly fashion...

First... the good: As there was no QF desk at MXP, we decided to try getting the BA ticket office to change my folks' tickets, as BA are on the same reservation system, before we resorted to calling QF and incur roaming charges. To our pleasant surprise, the lovely staff member manning the BA desk happily rebooked and reissued my parents' tickets on to their own documents. All for a token admin fee. We thanked the very kind agent, as we realised that he's done us a huge favour. BA shall be getting some positive feedback about their MXP ticketing staff shortly. :)

The bad: MA's handling agent at MXP refused to do anything, citing that "it's got nothing to do with us."

The ugly: The AA desk changed my ticket rather efficiently for a EUR30 admin fee, and claimed that they've confirmed with MA that my new booking is all kosher and good to go. AA took away my paper ticket coupon for "auditing purposes" and replaced it with what they claim is the eticket receipt for the new flight. They further claimed to have converted that one segment into an eticket. At check in however - the MA check in agent couldn't find any ticket numbers in his system, etix or otherwise. It turned out that AA MXP had erred in issuing my ticket and the document handed to me was some kind of receipt for the change fee (the 13 digit number on it was a receipt number and not a ticket number). Unfortunately AA's counter at MXP had long shut by that time, whilst there was no one at the BA desk.

More of the ugly: Throughout the whole time, MA's handling agent wouldn't lift a finger to render any assistance or advise.

And more of the good (I think) but more of an internal AA issue: I rang up the EXP desk. and the agent on the phone was most helpful and tried to sort something out. She confirmed that she couldn't see any new ticket numbers generated by AA MXP, and that the MXP agent had erred as all that was required was a revalidation of my existing ticket. The EUR30 admin fee was refunded to my credit card whilst I was on the phone with the EXP desk, and I was advised to simply buy a new oneway ticket to BUD (which cost EUR194) and send the bill to AA after my trip.

Moral of the story: Never attempt to catch a flight before midday. :p

..or travel with your parents ?

I prefer what we did last year.

I went on an LONE4, my parents went on some EK RTW deal. We all left on Aug 5, all returned to Australia the same weekend in Sep.

I went eastwards (North America first), they went west (Asia/Europe first). The nearest we got to each other was half way through the trip, they arrived in New York from Ireland as I was leaving Seattle for London.

MA does indeed sound dreadful and seems to have successfully filled the hole left by EI. Good riddance me thinks. I hope their foray into OW is brief!

The silver lining of course is that fortunately all the other alliance members seemed to have earned their place in the 'quality alliance' with RJ sounding like the new baby star of the group.

Yes, AA messed up, but MA sounded like they were not even vaguely interested in helping which is a big disappointment for a ticket which is theoretically possible to be changed and if necessary reissued by any alliance member.

Yes indeed, it's such a shame that MA (or rather, their handling agent at MXP) was so useless on the ground. In contrast, the short hop on MA over to BUD was pleasant for intra Europe in whY - though I note that there are wildly inconsistent reports of their product on here and elsewhere.

Yes, they certainly did, but that EXP desk consistently gets the job done, and all with a smile.

AA lurkers take note, -- thank you.

Sound like a similar problem as I had with AA late last year! Can SOMEONE please train the AA agents and let them know that NOT all Oneworld airlines or their interline partners use Sabre. Ticket Nos are required to be SSR accross!

So moral of the story ALWAYS get ur ticket nos and carry the plate print out with you at all TIMES! That is why I don't like E-tix at all!

Have u got ur money back for this yet. I am Skeptical that AA will accept the cost of this.

I'd deal with it when I get back to MEL (in 3 days' time). I hope they've noted the whole thing in my PNR (can't seem to log in to Sabre unless using my own ISP connection :confused:).

BA in NRT actually refused to reissue my BA issued AONE6, and told me to go to cathay to get it reissued. (According to them it should be the next flying carrier who should reissue the ticket). I know this was the rule for the initial issue of the ticket, but is this also the case for reissues??

Is it perhaps because you had no further BA segments left on the ticket? Then effectively BA has no stake in the new ticket.

Ticketing automation takes care of the SSRs.
A prerequisite, of course, is that ticketing must occur before the SSRs can be generated. I suspect that in this case the culprit may be the inexperience of a ticketing agent in an airport location with 1 flight/day and very little upline/downline connecting activity. Ticketing is not simple, particularly if the tickets and both international and interline. .

Say what you want, but if there's only one carrier out there that understands inter-system messaging, my bet goes to the inventor of the first GDS, the holder of the 001 airline code, that must send some sort of inter-system message for just about any interline itinerary it tickets.

I am actually not really techical at this but from what the agents tell me in Oneworld, it is actually a MANUAL task to enter any changes/new ticket nos are sent across to the airlines that are not using the same system.

Basically to cut it short my experience was that AA incorrectly issued a new e-ticket on my CX segments and did NOT "tell" them my new ticket nos. When CX tries to retrieve the booking in their system they can't see any tix nos.

From a PAX point of view IMO this is all BS! because we shouldn't worry ourselves with tix nos, pnrs etc.. We paid for a tix and all we have to do should only be showing the airline our receipts/actual tix coupons and not trying to do their work for them and note down all the every single minute detail.

My last flight is LHR-DAR on BA, so that cannot be it. I guess the BA people in japan are just lazy or don't know much about RTW tickets and didn't want to do this. It's disappointing though that they didn't want to reissue a BA issued first class ticket for a BA gold card holder. Fortunately cathay were excellent as they always are, but BA ground services were disappointing (which they tend to be most of the time).

The joys of oneworld.....

I'm currently traveling on a AA issued DONE5 (paper ticket) and tried to change the date of one of my BA flights.

So I called BA, but they refused to change my reservation because it was issued by a travel agent? (and they couldn't lookup the fare rules)

AA told me to call BA, because it was their flight, and they use a different reservation system...

So now I will have to no-show a flight, which BA probably won't like. (I don't care, as most of my flights are open dated, so canceling my reservations isn't going to impact me.)

Are there any rules about which airline is responsible for date changes? I always thought it was the operating carrier?

In theory BA is meant to be able to do it for you, with a service fee.

If the ticket is issued by AA however, they should have "full control" over all segments of the ticket regardless of what GDS the operating carrier/s of the individual segments are hosted on. I'm suspecting that you got a newbie (a lot of them around these days) at the ATW desk as IME they've always been more than happy to help me alter my itinerary on AA-issued tickets, regardless of operating carrier.

I have had no trouble changeing BA, QF and CX segment on xONEx's ticketed by AA.

Recently, they appear to have had to re-issue each time for reasons mentioned elswhere in this forum but there has been no charge for this.

I've had 2 LONE4's and 1 LGLOBE29 to date all ticketed by QF. I've had changes made to each of them enroute by QF, JL, BA and AA, never been charged for any of them. The only issue I've had was during the last one, BA changed the booking code from QF32 to BA7372 when they changed the date.

My turn to experience another wrinkle on this theme. I want to reissue an AONE ticket originally issued by a TA on BA paper in S Africa. The TA called BA on Friday and was told he must go to Cathay since the next flight on the ticket is HKG/NRT on CX. When he insisted that BA must reissue since it is on BA paper, they said fine, take it to BA in HKG! :rolleyes:

Fortunately the TA is a peristent fellow it seems (he is the 4th person from the same agency that I am dealing with, so I have no prior experience with him) and decided he just got a lazy agent who didn't want any work on a Friday aftrenoon. So he will go to CPT in person tomorrow and try to sort it out with a BA agent he knows there.

Oh, for some consistency in OW!

Well, just in case anyone else needs to reissue with BA in CPT, this is what transpired.

TA went to CPT and arranged everything with BA. But they would not allow his agency to pay :confused: and so I had to go in person. When I did this the agent who knows about such things wasn't there and the agents at the desk were clueless. They found the documentation left by their colleague but were very tentative and unsure. Then I discovered that the first leg had been left off the new booking. Presumably this was because it was the same routing as the original ticket, albeit on a different carrier.

After phoning the agent who arranged it, they wanted to sticker the first leg on my paper ticket and re-issue the rest. Rightly or wrongly this did not fill me with confidence. The thought of presenting the first coupon of a paper ticket that I assume needed to be cancelled to reissue the last 3 coupons struck me as highly dubious. For all I know this may be perfectly acceptable practice but I didn't see why I should risk a major drama in a week's time during a 3 hour layover.

After I insisted that they reissue the full ticket a few more phone calls produced the result. Intially they wanted to send it off for re-pricing but I managed to persuade them that there was no possibility that the taxes or levies could change and if they were prepared to sticker the paper coupon they should be prepared to add the leg to the e-ticket.

So, eventually, they did the re-isssue but not without my having to be quite insistent and refusing to make another trip to CPT. In the meantime it looks as if they have made entirely new bookings on all the legs as there are new reference numbers for the other airlines, so I have no idea if my seat bookings made by the TA are going to hold. He is investigating. Interestingly my TA has declined to charge me a fee but BA was quick to pocket their ZAR300 (about USD30) pp for their rather disjointed efforts.

Bottom line: like most outstations BA in CPT is poorly equipped to do re-issues and there appears to be only one person who is competent in this. Avoid it if you can.

Well, AA finally paid up but not without a bit of effort on my part.

Rang up the EXP desk 2 days after I got back to Australia on 19th Feb. EXP Agent scrolled around in my PNR but had "absolutely no idea" what to do, and told me to contact the refunds department. I had a feeling this wasn't right as it wasn't an AA ticket that I want refunded. It was some wee hour in the morning Dallas time so maybe they put on "B Team" to work during that time. Sure enough the agent I spoke to at the Refunds department told me to contact Customer Relations first who have to authorise the refund.

I then shot off an email to Customer Relations 2 weeks later (v busy with more pressing errands) to ask for a physical office to write and send stuff to so i can get my refund. Despite v clear notes in the PNR (which I'm able to view) inserted by the original AA EXP desk supervisor I'd spoken to whilst in MXP and my v clear email stating that it was an MA ticket that AA had promised to reimburse me for, I was told that AA will only refund the difference between the AA ticket and my MA ticket - which is totally not what's promised or desired. So i sent another email, reiterating the previous email and emphasising the refund of the entire MA ticket that was originally promised.

Eventually, someone in the Dublin office replied and took ownership of the issue, and told me to forward all relevant documentation to the Dublin office with a note addressed to her. I'm guessing it took about a week for the documents to arrive in Dublin via regoed post. She then asked for the unused coupon on the AA LEURPASS ticket - which I don't have (it's buried in the depths somewhere of AA's MXP ticket desk) and was the sole reason for the need to buy the new MA ticket for MXP-BUD in the first place.

Thankfully she finally understood everything and a month later my refund for both the change fee and MA ticket finally came through.