drn

When flying to some smaller markets in Europe, I regularly end up with AA codeshare flights operated by BA in my itinerary. In some cases, these include the longer transatlantic legs.

In the past, I have been able to call American and pay $ to upgrade just the transatlantic leg, operated by BA, to premium economy or business.

Fast forward now - I have a trip with tickets issued by American, with the transatlantic leg operated by BA, and American is telling me they cannot upgrade the BA segment. My only option is to re-ticket and upgrade the entire itinerary.

I tried calling BA, but as expected, this results in them telling me to call American.

Did I miss a policy/terms change in regards to codeshare flights operated by BA, or is there something else that is causing this issue?

USFlyerUS

Did you upgrade or upfare/buyup previously? Did the prior times involve a connection to/from the transatlantic leg or was the transatlantic leg one part of a multi-stop journey? You may be running into married segment logic if the transatlantic leg is a connecting flight and you're looking to upfare/buyup.

drn

Not for this itinerary. I have on past similar itineraries.

This trip is AA->BA(want to upgrade with $)->BA and BA->AA->AA on the return vs the last trip that I upgraded being AA->AA->BA and BA->BA(upgraded with $)->AA on the return.

I thought married segment logic was only applied to award(miles redemption) upgrades? In this case, American is willing to re-ticket the entire itinerary on the same flights in a higher cabin, but will not take my money for just upgrading the BA segment.

carlosdca

On a revenue ticket?
You were not upgraded, you bough up to PE/J on an specific segment because the itinerary/fare allowed it.
So you were basically issued a new ticket just like what they are offering now.

JonNYC

here is the policy for review:

flying_geek

If there is space available, BA will sell you a one class upgrade at the airport.

Geordie405

I don't see why it would matter that you're only trying to upgrade one of the segments. The policy uses the word "any" and it covers codeshares. However, is there a reason you only want to pay to upgrade one of the flights? Is there a significant cost saving to doing this rather than upgrading all the flights, either for the entire itinerary or just one way?

FWIW only last week I upgraded an AA booking from PE to J where all flights except one were BA operated and had no issues at all. Very knowledgeable agent who knew about the waiver and processed the sell up / upgrade in a matter of minutes with the ticket confirmation arriving via e-mail shortly afterwards. The only thing was that the first flight changed from an AA codeshare to the BA prime flight number.

Apart from the waiver, I find that the whole change / reticketing process is so much better with AA than with BA where even the most simple changes often need to be sent away and take weeks to be processed.