I average 6 AONE4 tickets a year for travel and have about 2-4 open at any one time and have for the past five years. Within the past 6 months, I've had three e-tickets cancelled by Cathay, one by BA, and three by AA. Cathay and BA are very good and work diligently to correct the mistake, which I am never privy to what the mistake is, but they seem to fix whatever problem occurred (Cathay much more efficient that BA). AA is a different matter altogether. This past week, whenever I needed to make a change, I've been sent for a "fraud investigation" for back to back ticketing. The latest snafu has left me stranded in London waiting for a seat to JNB of which there were several available when I tried to make the change, and obviously no seats in either A or D now for three days. AA has no problems selling me the tickets in the first place, why the "fraud concern" after the fact? They apologized and gave me a $350 voucher!!!! Barely covers the cost of hotel internet in London for three days.

Another AA concern is that last week, I called AA and changed my flight from DXB to LHR from the 935am flight to the 710am flight. Night before departure, I checked the BA website and the change was there. I get to the counter the next morning, the confirmation code was correct, but the eticket number was wrong in the system. Why does a ticket have to be reissued for a change of time on the same day? This never happened with paper tix. The BA counter in Dubai finally figured it out, but then the ticket had to go to the AA rate desk for recalculation. Well, there were sixteen segments, so the recalc took forever and they had to override the checkin time for me to board even though I showed up two hours before the flight. On top of that, they tried to charge me a $125 change fee.

AA used to have the best customer service in my experience, now it's a fight to get on the plane. I've missed two important meetings and had to reschedule an entire week in China because of this. Does anyone have any idea if AA replaced their entire RTW group or any other explanation about what's going on? I simply cannot afford this uncertainty in flying and missing meetings.

Consider putting at least one open-dated segment on your tickets. That forces paper ticketing and avoids many of the problems. Like you I feel that e-ticketing is a large backwards step as far as we customers are concerned.

I've had similar issues with e-tickets. More than a year since the big push to 100% e-ticket (which hasn't actually been achieved), most airlines' systems still cannot deal with them properly in all circumstances.

Whoa! If an airline's mistake caused me to reschedule an entire week of China, I don't think anything could make me fly it again!

Many airlines, in my experience many of them in the US need to reissue an E-Ticket for almost any change. So the re-issue happens for time changes, data changes, change of airline etc. etc.
And this then causes many issues down the track. On the one hand, things can go wrong (as in your case) and on the other I always have a discussion with the airline because they want to charge a re-issue fee even so the rules say that this change should be free (because it was never ment to be a re-issue).

Maybe a stupid question but won't populating the open segment not cause a $125 change fee?

No, because you don't need to change or reissue the ticket. "Open" means valid on any flight on that route where you hold a valid reservation in the appropriate class. So you just make a reservation for the flight you want and give them the ticket number. (The routing is fixed, it's just the date that's open)

Thanks! This will be one of the cases where AA will try to charge me a re-issue fee and then we have to argue about it. I guess I will try to do this in the future.

I called AA RTW yesterday to change the date on one flight segment of my current AONE5, and was told that the ticket would need to be reissued (but no fee) and to expect a confirmation email in a couple of hours.
Email had not arrived 24hours later, so I called again and was told that it was still queued for reissue, but she would do it immediately, and she gave me the new ticket number on the phone.
I questioned why a simple date change needed a reissue and she said that they had been having problems with the different airlines' computer systems not communicating properly, so now all date/time changes require a reissue and a new ticket number.

Probably makes it even more important now to make sure you get the email with the new ticket number, every time you make a change, and keep track of the most recent ticket number, in case of questions at check in (especially with other airlines.)

(This only applies to e-tickets, obviously.)
Happy Travels.

I always keep PNR and ticket numbers on my pocket wallet size itinerary that I keep with other important phone numbers, passport number, phone numbers for CC cancellation etc. Maybe paranoid, but even if it is useful once.....

I have personally had problems with this so this gets a thumbs up from me.

Seems i have been lucky. I also typically have several RTWs open at the same time with lots of date and routing changes.
I use a travel agent who does all the changes for me. A short email of what i want to have changed (after checking if A is available on the flights) and he does everything else.
He charges some money for the service but it is money very well spent.

I'm beginning to understand how airlines can lose so much money. I personally invest about $100k a year into Oneworld member tickets so it doesn't really do me any good to get mad, just confused on a regular basis, like every time I show up at the airport. I fly LHR-ZRH on fairly often and lately can never get either a D or L seat. I check EF and it shows D9 and L9. Make the call to change to the flight I want, ticket agent says no seats. I refresh EF, and sure enough, no seats. So I say book me in L and put me on waitlist. I get the reply, no L seats and waitlist not allowed. I refresh EF and no seats. Go to BA.com, get mileage ticket for same flight. How can an airline give away a seat, but deny a premium passenger with a paid ticket a seat? Needless to say, every time that's happened, the plane is half full, so I call BA, they return my miles but not the taxes and fees. After hours on the phone with BA, no one seems to want to check the computer programming, so I'll just quit buying that route and get the free tickets from now, pretty good use of otherwise limited worth BA miles.

For the 4th time in the last three weeks, both AA and BA have cancelled my e-tickets, submitted my account for a fraud audit and otherwise blacklisted my assistants from speaking with anyone at the RTW desk again. A few days ago I was flying from DXB-LHR yet again and I checked my account on both AA and BA to see if the change I wanted was there. It was. I arrive at LHR for a long connection. Check my accounts and all flights on two RTW tickets are gone. Walk up to customer service in the biz lounge. She informs me they were cancelled because I missed my flight. No, I'm standing here and here's my boarding pass. Two hours later, no one can figure it out, but they don't reinstate my tickets either. Assistants start making calls......Assistants get banned......costs me $300 to reinstate one ticket........AA admits mistake........Assistant calls back for compensation of some sort.....big mistake (still banned)........tickets get cancelled again, account referred to fraud audit for second time in three weeks.......tickets magically reappear overnight.....no compensation, assistants still banned.

Still no explanation as to why one of the tickets was cancelled. AA blames BA and won't do anything because it's a BA problem, BA blames AA and won't do anything because it's a AA problem. Talked to AA supervisor who put me on hold and then disconnected. These are tickets and routes I've taken dozens of times and can't imagine why the interest in fraud. Interestingly, I've yet to encounter a problem with an award ticket from either airline. So maybe I'll quit buying tickets for the next year or so and just travel on free tickets from now on......People suggest just getting a paper ticket......last paper ticket I had from BA was cancelled too.....just try getting a paper ticket reinstated over the phone...... makes my life a little more interesting than desired and the phone bills are starting to cost more than the air tickets.......my experiences on other alliances, although different, are much worse, so I'm stuck in Oneworld purgatory.

Since you're thinking of using miles in lieu of revenue tickets, it may be worth noting that BA miles are sometimes very good value on partner arilines. I've booked F seats on CX from North America to Asia for 75k BA miles plus a few dollars for taxes (and not the many hundreds of dollars of taxes and fuel charges that they charge for travel on BA), and they allow an enroute stopover for free. They also charge only 80K for RT travel from NA to Easter Island on LAN's excellent J, and allow 2 free stopovers for RTs. I consider both of those to be very good value.