I got excited when one of my old AA vouchers seemed to apply towards a revenue ticket. I was given this voucher a while ago. It expired without me having the chance to use it. I plugged it into the payment option just to see if by chance it still works. To my surprise, the reservation system seemed to think it covered the cost of the ticket! Could it be that my notes are wrong and it’s actually a higher denomination and didn’t expire? Just for research, I booked another reservation with the same voucher, and it covered the cost of that too. It was time to let it play out.
I checked back after half a day to find it still not ticketed. It didn’t seem good. I had a feeling it was related to a fact that burned me in the past – that AA doesn’t check credit card validity when the reservation is first made (as pending). You see, every AA reservation is passed onto a ticketing department before it can be officially ticketed. And only when it’s deemed ticketable, is the payment method verified. If the phone agent got the CC info wrong because 1) you had to call to book CX or JAL, 2) spelling things out over the phone one digit at a time is error prone, 3) AA agents pretty much suck across the board; then your reservation is now stuck in limbo, you may or may not be contacted, and agents may or may not have any idea why it’s not ticketing. If they process CC this way, maybe they do the same shit with vouchers.
Sure enough, a day later, I got an email saying the reservation can’t be ticketed due to invalid payment. It makes sense given the above insight, and this discussion kind of affirms it.
That concludes this research, and now we have one more thing to hate AA for.
Leave a Reply