Waiving $100 change fee
 

Is there any reasonable way to get around
the $100 change fee for a nonrefundable
ticket on AA? I am willing to buy a new
ticket and take the value of the old ticket in a TCV, but so far, AA has been unyielding.
Any ideas on how to proceed.

What sort of change? Are you changing routing, dates, times; inbound, outbound, or both?

Received by email:
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In your response to your query:

I am trying to leave one day earlier. same destination. same departure.
everything else is the same with plenty of "cheap" class seats on all flights.

Thank you.
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If you're comfortable that the flight won't fill up, you may be able to stand-by. I don't know AA's rules on different day standby - you need to check these. Otherwise, or if you want to confirm your switch, you could try pleading that you made an error when ticketing (esp. if you bought online), but you're probably going to have to pony up the $100.

There's an interesting discussion on this on the Delta board:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum21/HTML/003829.html

Even thought this may be the "right" board to ask, you may have better luck on the AA board with AA experts.

I'm not sure about AA, but if it's an international ticket, can't you use the full value towards a higher priced ticket?

Umm... Am I missing something here? If you bought a non-refundable ticket with a penalty, then of course there is going to be a penalty.

Of course, if you wanted to go a day later, you could always do a barefoot denied boarding refund, but I've always considered that to be kind of sleezy.

On AA there is no such thing as standby on any day except the day of travel. If you try to go on your current ticket the day before you are taking a very good chance of recalculating the new itinerary at that time (especially since your record probably has a note in it about you wanting to change). Probably a full-fare ‘y’ ticket, even if you are the only passenger on the flight. You’ll even still get charged the $100 penalty to use your current ticket. If they didn’t charge the fee on the change to the “y” ticket, you could get a full refund and save the $100, defeating the purpose of the $100 change penalty.