hobo13

I had to make some changes to future award tickets tonight. One award was OneWorld (AA) and one was Star (UA).

Called AA first: Needed to change the origin to a different neighboring COUNTRY, as well as the date -- and it was not an AA flight. Wait time to reach an agent was about 1 minute (no status!) and once I reached the agent, he completed the transaction without putting me on hold at all. Total time -- 8 minutes

Then I called UA: This was a fairly simple routing change. Instead of doing XXX-YYY-ZZZ, I found a better connection that was XXX-WWW-ZZZ. Compared to AA, this seemed easy. Wrong. The agent had to put me on hold while she waited on hold herself for the rate desk. That took 30 minutes. Then it took another 30 minutes for them to make the change. Total time: 1 hour 10 minutes. And the worst part? I just noticed that the ticket didn't actually re-issue, so I am back on hold waiting for them to try to figure out why it won't reissue. 30 minutes and counting.

So, if this is not SHARES, what ancillary system shall we blame?

LAXJetter

I had BKK-HKG-JFK booked in CX F on an AA award ticket back in January. I had to move the flight up a week at t-12 days. The only thing available according to the agent was JL F bkk-nrt-jfk. I verbally confirmed she was booking me into F. Hours later, I check the reservation and its booked into regional Y and intl C. Took me hours upon hours (while on vacation mind you) with various supervisors before they finally got CX revenue management to give AA the seat I had originally reserved.

Your mileage may vary.

pbd456

it seems like you are saying good thing about AA.......

AA can manage to get CX to open up seats for you just because you need to fly them.. (or did you know that CX had seats that AA didnt see, or what other reasons?)

justforfun

And you're sure it just wasn't a known glitch on aa.com? It can show business award reservations as economy and first award reservations as business.

LAXJetter

No. It was the wrong bucket. Though that glitch did scare me the first time I saw the reservation

lunettes noires

I called UA to change an award ticket this morning too. .bomb wouldn't let me touch it (not too surprising given it was an int'l open jaw with segments on UA and LH). This being my first post-3/3 call, I was initially hopeful to hear only 3 minutes predicted hold time. But once the agent picked up (after 15 minutes) things went downhill fast. I probably should have hung up as soon as she tried to tell me that since no "super saver" (?) seats were available with the exact same routing/carriers on my new dates, I was out of luck. I explained the change rules and she did a search and proclaimed "our systems here" showed no saver flights available for my new dates.

Did another search on .bomb and got the same results back; after spending another 45 minutes coaching her through checking availability segment by segment finally had a working itinerary relatively close to what I wanted which she could take to the rate desk, which came up with an add/collect figure $13 above the difference between what the web site quoted for the new and old tickets. She would not itemize the taxes for me so I could compare and find their error, so I decided to quit while I was ahead. On a positive note, she did NOT charge me the $75 change fee for changing carriers on one segment or upgrading the return to J from Y. Not sure whether this is policy for old pmCO bookings or it just isn't in their script.

FWIW, my reservation ticketed minutes after I hung up the phone, and they even emailed me twice about it.