It doesn't seem that wrong to me. The AA office for AU and NZ is now in AU. If the tickets are being issued from the office, then could reasonably expect them to say that they cannot issue at NZ prices since they are not in NZ.

They are able to do them but seemingly have put in a restriction to help to ensure that the sales restriction is not circumvented by someone in Brisbane phoning the office in Brisbane and avoiding paying the AU price.

SWP is not the only region where using foreign credit cards are restricted; AA US ,won't take non-US cards in general

The issue can, I would expect, be circumvented by using a travel agent in NZ , ensuring that the 1st sector is on AA flight number and having the agent issue it through AA

Dave

How do they define the location of a credit card? By the issuing bank or by the billing location? It is really not at all uncommon for these to be in different countries.

And as I said before, many credit card processing engines do not verify addresses for cards issued outside North America, so very often a dummy address in the desired country will suffice. (I haven't tried this with OWEs, but I have, for example, with iTunes which was, in principle, not available to people in Hong Kong. I have a UK (Jersey) based debit card - when I put the correct HK billing address it was rejected; when I put a dummy UK address against the same card it was accepted no problem.)

I was provided with the direct Brisbane number by AA RTW, +61 7 3329 6060, and also attempted to make contact via the toll free NZ number, 0800-887-997.

Both rang through to the Brisbane number, which is in turn diverted to an Asian country.

Is it? Or is it just a local number re-routed elsewhere?

The staff I spoke to were definitely not in Australia, so they were not selling the ticket from NZ, or Australia for that matter. Should we therefore be paying the fare applicable to India, Pakistan or Vietnam, or wherever AA chose to locate their 'Brisbane' office?

The reservations number in Oz goes to Brisbane. AA did have the reservations in India for a while, but that was relocated to Australia a while back

There is , I believe, still a ticketing person or 2 in Sydney

Dave

More on this here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...l#post11979396