re-route/re-issue question (misery)
 

Hi all.

I'm in Japan on part of an ex-ICN asia, europe, south america, australia RTW.

Some good friends recently decided to travel to europe, and we (my + ms bottletop) thought it would be fun to re-route the europe segments, and spend some time with our friends in europe.

I rang AA oz and japan (due to timezones), and they said as there was no AA segments, they would not reroute (and therefore reissue) the ticket. With the Japan desk the girl said to ring the next carrier (BA). Before ending the call I asked her if the next carrier would add their fuel surcharges to the re-issue cost, and she said it didn't matter, AA was adding fuel surcharges as well now, since 1st march.. (hopefully this is not true)

Anyway, I'm certain that the fuel surcharges from BA or another carrier would likely be more than the cost of some additional tickets (to join our friends in a few places in europe).

I will try to ring AA RTW desk tonight to see if they will reroute and issue.

Questions I have (hope someone can help):
1) Does AA normally re-ticket?
2) Will re-ticketing with a new carrier result in getting their fuel surcharges?
3) Is there another carrier i could use, that has low fuel surcharges? (finnair?/jal)

I did read that JAL was dropping it's fuel surcharges by up to 92% effective on flights april 1st - unfortunately i need to leave japan for london before april.

Thanks in advance.

In my experience today this is not true. I have just had reissued by AA (set up via the RTW desk, fare calc by AA Dublin, reissue by AA GSA in HKG) two AONE3 tickets whose remaining segments were:
LHR-oDXB-oLHR-oHEL-oCDG-oHKG-oKIX-xHKG-MNL
to
LHR-oCAI-xLHR-oCDG-oHKG-oBOM-xHKG-MNL
for a total charge of HKD718, which I take to be about US$46 per ticket. This means that not only did AA not add any fuel fines (there were none in the original issue), they actually refunded a tax difference of about US$79 / ticket.

As you can see, there are no AA segments remaining on the ticket, and AA was happy to reissue it (originally set up via the AA RTW desk and ticketed by their GSA in MNL).

My recommendation to you would be to call the RTW desk (now open quite long hours - 07:30 to 22:00 Dallas time M-F, plus shorter hours Saturday & Sunday, if I remember correctly) and get them to sort it out.

thankfully you are absolutely correct. i rang them last night and they sorted it out. (i do love that desk).

The lady took the changes, got them right, and was nice to boot :) (just had to get them to arrange for the fee to be paid somewhere - over the phone to Australian desk is easy for me)

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If you can (with time zones and all), try caling aa rtw mon-fri 8-4 dfw time. There's a tendency to get better agents then.

Hmm, I was beginning to wonder if that is true. My Done4's taxes came up to around $450 with a strange suspecting 200YQ on it which I think is the fuel surcharge for the one intercontinental AA sector.

If you ticket with AA, then they always add on their own fuel fines

• but they only have fuel fines on inter-continental sectors, not domestic sectors ('domestic' includes regional sectors such as to Canada and the Carribean)
• and they don't collect fuel fines for any other airlines on the ticket

So ticketing via AA for a routing that includes, say, QF SYD-JFK, AA wouldn't add fuel surcharges for this flight, even if booked as AA codeshare?

If QF flight number - no fuel fine
If AA flight number - fuel fine

I know - we flew it last November - using the AA flight number and paid the fuel fine. We were doing the platinum challenge and this flight, of nearly 10k miles, got us over the line, so I figured it was worth paying the fuel fine to a) get to platinum b) get nearly 10,000 bonus miles for the flight and c) have nearly 10,000 miles towards getting 4 x 500 mile upgrade stickers (We then bought a fifth and used them to upgrade our flight from BGI to BOS^)

AA WILL apply their YQ to a transpacific AA marketed codeshare flight on QF metal. They WILL NOT apply any YQ if travelling on the QF flight number for the same flight.

Congratulations on making the challenge, and for doing so via QF SYD-JFK.

So are there advantages to flying on an AA codeshare versus a QF flight number? On a DONEx the EQP, I think the class of service bonus, and elite bonus would be the same either way, but I could easily be confused. (On a JL or BA operated flight, using an AA codeshare for the flight number would be better than using the JL or BA code, because with an AA code you'll get the elite status bonus, but for QF it doesn't matter, I think.)

Thank you for the congratulations:)

On a DONEx I believe there is no difference (apart from the need to fly 4 AA flights in a year - but IIRC AA does not enforce that unlike QF).

But, unfortunately, Mrs P and I are on a Lone4 and then it can matter:

• QF vs AA codeshare - a QF 'L' only gives 50% (and because we're AA PLT we get the 100% bonus on that 50% bringing us back to 100% overall); whereas on the AA codeshare we'd get 200%
  
• CX vs AA codeshare - a CX 'L' earns no AA miles:(; whereas on the AA codeshare we'd get the 200%