Questions and Answers

I had a complicated award booked with AA (US-HKG-SYD-MEL-AUH-US) that had a 6 hour schedule change. Since that 6 hour schedule change (on Sept 6 or so) there have been several smaller schedule changes of around 1 hr each. I was on the fence about whether or not to use the award and I decided to cancel. Since there was a 6 hour schedule change I thought there would be no reinstate fee, but they fought me hard and in the end made a “special exception.” The front line customer service agent fought hard first and then the supervisor I was sent to fought but eventually relented and offered me a full refund and reinstatement without a fee.

They said

1.) That the most recent schedule change was only 1 hour so I could not avoid the fee because the 6 hour schedule change happened one month ago. Supposedly, the most recent change is the only one that matters.

2.) I had accepted the change because the ticket was reissued and they [U]never[/U] reissue tickets unless someone is on the phone with them. However, I definitely did not accept it specifically because I was thinking about cancelling and was thrilled when I saw the big schedule change.

What am I missing here? I have a couple more reservations like this and do not want to fight agents for hours on this if I am wrong.

Are schedule changes not the sure fire “free” cancellation they were in the past? Usually I would hang up and call back, but the initial agent cancelled the itin and could not fix it (of course not, EY and CX J and F flights) so I felt I needed to fix it right away.

Sounds like a bad set of agents 🙁 shouldn’t have been so complicated for you.

If you accepted the original 6 hour schedule change, then from then on that became the new (ticketed) itinerary. After that, if you had a few 1 hour changes where you could still make those legal connections, then it is not that easy to justify the request for waiving of the reinstatement fee (in my opinion).
If on the other hand, you waited until all those schedule changes happened, but did not agree to the schedule change/s, you are in a better position because you can claim that you have not seen those changes at all (sometimes airlines do not send those schedule change emails).