On my recent trip tro Italy I had nothing but problems with our airline tickets, I even had to buy one leg just to get home $900.00! Sorry this is long but want to give all the info.

Here is what happened. I purchases my AA tickets thru an FF agent, FF miles on one and purchased the other. We get to the San Francisco check in and the agent spends 15 minutes frowning, calling other agents over looking at her computer. She asks us if we changed our reservations, I said no. She said it was wierd, her computer had us booked on a non existant flight out of Sacramento but it showed us being reserved on the San Francicso flight. she said she didnt know how the cpmputer could even do this. After much typing and help she issued us our boarding passes and assured us everything was fine. We were going thru London staying over night and on to Venice the next day, no problem here. Our nightmare began on our return from Pisa. We get to the airport 2 hours early and are the 4th people in line. They open the check on 20 minutes late and only on agent. We get to the counter. (its BA, AA partner airline). She has the same look our agent from SFO. We spend 20 minutes while she is typing away and calling other agents over. She says our ticket is invalid and nothing she can do and sends over to the ticket counter for them to fix. We wait in line, they look at our reservation and says its fine, sends us back over the the check in. She again cant issue us our boarding pass and sends us back over the the ticketing counter. Now all of these people are contracted out it looks like, since the BA people are wearing Italia uniforms and the ticket counter handles all airlines. We are back at teh ticket counter and she said sorry there is nothing they can do, they cant issue us a boarding pass and we have to buy a ticket. We ask her to call AA and she said no, we need to do that and there is not enough time anyway since its now only 45 minutes to departure after all of this. SO we buy our ticket Pisa to Gatwick $900.00 Yikes, but we ahve to get on this flight so we do it.

We get to Gatwick and go to customer service, explain what happened, they didint understand why they didnt just manually issue us a boarding pass. They put all of this info into AA and BA computer so we can make a claim when we get back. We said so are our return tickets to SFO tomorrow okay, they looked and saw no problem and said were were fine. We werent, get to check in the same thing. I said let me guess its showing this SFO Sacramento mess and she said yes. I sounds like only when you are trying issue the boarding pass is when the problem shows up. So I know this is what happened in Pisa. They finally issue us manual boarding pass.

My only recourse so far has been call the AA number and they said I need to wait 7 - 10 days and then email again, there is no one I can talk to. this is crazy.

Does anyone know of any I can get personally talk to someone at AA about this?

Thanks

Laurie

Oh you poor baby! What a fiasco. I don't know anyone but the travel but I will certainly pass along your dilemma. Glad you made it home safe & sound though and that they still had space for you on your flight.

Ginger

I would read over at FlyerTalk.com and post on the American Airlines forum. Good luck!

What a mess!
What do you think the problem was? Was it because you used your FF miles?

I'm just glad you made it home safely. A little lighter in the pocketbook....

My husband had a multi-sector trip to/from the Far East recently - there a was a computer error at the beginning in London that showed him with a seat reservd on one flight, but with his e-ticket valid for the next flight. They did sort it out, manually, but the error followed him around for two weeks, with his booking always being out of step with itself.

No-one could explain why - caused lots of hassle and a missed connection in Singapore.
Fixing it at one point didn't seem to fix it for the next. He was not a happy boy, but at least he wasn't out of pocket. Hope you get a refund and appologies soon.

I'd write a nice deatailed letter to the CEO of American Airlines. A friend of mine does this with every customer service problem she has with great results and I've done it a few times myself. Go straight to the top, or at least to the V.P. in charge of customer service (and cc the CEO). You clearly use them a lot since your miles are with them. That should carry some weight. You can find names, addresses, etc. on the AA website. Good luck.

Oh Laurie, that's so awful. Hope you get it sorted and your money back.

Good luck. Hopefully your holiday was good.

Elly

quote:

She said it was wierd, her computer had us booked on a non existant flight out of Sacramento but it showed us being reserved on the San Francicso flight

I had something like this happen to me on the last leg of my journey from Rome to MSP. The last leg was supposed to be ORD Chicago to MSP. That was what our eticket and reservation sheet from CheapTickets showed. My husband realized the problem back in the US when he tried to use Flight Tracker on us. He said that that United flight number was for Sacramento. We get to Chicago and tied to check in. No flight number. No reservation. With what documentation we did have, United issued us tickets on a flight from ORD to MSP eventually. I didn't have to get rude or nasty though.
Did you contact a superviser in Pisa? Did you make a scene? Once you spent your $900 you gave them an edge to do nothing more about it.

Maybe you should be contacting the agent you used to buy the ticket though. Maybe they screwed up. I am pretty sure that CheapTickets are the ones that screwed up our tickets. I check all the flight number now when i get my reservations to make sure that they are real flights.

I recently had an AA issue resolved by using the customer service email on their web site. We had a voucher from a flight we weren’t able to take that was expiring in June. We wanted to book our tickets in May but not fly until October. The phone rep said she couldn’t help us, but suggested we contact the customer service email. It did take a couple of weeks, but someone did eventually get back to me with a voucher number I could use for travel through the rest of the year. (I don't know whether it helped that I told her we needed the October ticket for our son's wedding in California.)

But the rest of your situation with the computer glitches sounds something like what happened with us in Rome when I had to return home unexpectedly because of a broken arm. Our tickets were with KLM, and we had been told on the phone that we had a confirmed reservation. But when we got to the Rome airport, the rep at the desk could not get the computer to issue boarding passes. I don’t know what the problem was, but there were several people working on it, and, no exaggeration, we stood at the desk for an hour while she kept banging on the keyboard with no success. Finally I broke down in tears because I could see the flight deadline approaching and I was in so much pain with my arm. I don’t know whether the tears were a factor, but she eventually got something out of the computer that did let us get on the plane in Rome at the very last minute.

However, when we got to Amsterdam, we went through the whole thing all over again since one of our seats was not showing up on the computer reservation. After reading that other thread on how the airlines bump people at the last minute, I am wondering if that is what they eventually did for us, since we were having to pay full business class fare to get the tickets. Maybe what they did was to bump someone who was only being upgraded, or had paid a lesser amount since we did ultimately get on the plane, but not until after a lot of nailbiting (well, at least on the hand of the unbroken arm!).

- Roz

thank you for your responses. Sounds like this problem isnt so rare after all. I booked our tickets on the phone directly with AA so that should have some merit. Good idea about writing the Ceo or someone higher. If I dont hear something soon I will do this. Roz, I used that email form, I also faxed yesterday asking for an update. Dragonpat, We probably should have asked for a supervisor in Pisa. We were having the language translation problem though and we dont speak any Italian. I think we could have gone further if they were BA employees vs contracted help. I will keep you posted


Laurie

Just an update, AA refunded my tickets. I had also put a dispute with my cc company. I thought it couldnt hurt. I was surprised to see they credited the amount in dispute immediately.

So now my account is kind of a mess because I didnt know they would credit my account so I didnt pay it, so now I have that plus the credit Citibank and and now the credit AA put back on my card.

At least its all resolved.

Laurie

Roz -- We were unable to use our AA Advantage return tickets from Italy this past June because I was ill and we returned on a flight at a later date which our travel insurance booked. I booked our AA tickets in July 2006 and was told that in order to use the return ticket we would have to return from Rome by July 31, 2007. Then another agent said we could use the return ticket from anywhere but travel still had to be complete travel by July 31, 2007 which is one year from the booking date.

You situation sounds the similar to ours. Did you book your flight with miles or was the voucher for a paid ticket? I don't know if I should persist in trying to get some credit for the unused return tickets. They also said I could not get any mileage credit because it was for the return flight and we had already used miles for our departure.

Carole

quote:

Did you book your flight with miles or was the voucher for a paid ticket?

Our original AA flight that we cancelled was a paid ticket, and in fact was a full fare (not cheapest economy) ticket. So that may have been a factor in getting the voucher extended. I doubt that they would be so generous with miles tickets -- I understand it is hard enough to get those miles flights in the first place!