Questions and Answers

I was recently charged a $150 change fee for changing my AA award for HKG-LAX. I called and tweeted AA. Both said the change fee was legit.

According to @AmericanAir, “If you’re not changing your carrier which would require a reissue, you can change the date or times without a charge. If you’re changing to another airline then the ticket would require a reissue and a change charge would apply.”

I’ve made several changes to the dates, routing and airlines before, but didn’t incur any change fee. This time I changed from HKG-KIX-LAX on CX+JL to HKG-JFK-ORD-LAX on CX+AA. Did I overlook some of the change rules?

I believe the issue is that you changed from JL to AA and that’s what triggered the fee. (But someone else please chime in if I’m wrong!)

It seems to be the case. I pressed them again, but same reply: “We checked the rules on your AAdvantage ticket and yes, if you’re looking to change any portion of the ticket that would result in you changing the airline that you’re flying on, or the route, the change charge would be $150. Like we mentioned before though, you can always change the dates around, without a charge as long you don’t change any of the things we mentioned previously.”

Looks like I got away with the fee for the previous changes.

Tiffany’s post [URL=’http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/10/28/best-award-ticket-change-fees/’]here [/URL]does say that if you change the airline combination, you incur a $150 change fee.

However, I had ticketed HKG-AUH in EY but decided to change it to HKG-SIN-AUH on CX and EY and I was told there’s no fees.

Well, the rule [I]used[/I] to be that if you were changing from an AA-only award to a partner award, that would trigger a fee. There’s honestly nothing I can see about the change you made that would have triggered a fee a few months ago.

That being said, American doesn’t actually publish their routing rules, so this could be a change. I would call one more time and specifically ask the help desk to look at it, and in the meantime we’ll see if anyone at AA can clarify on our end.

This is a tricky one, since American doesn’t publish these rules anywhere. Based on data points lately, it seems like American is charging the fee if you change between any of the following:
— All oneworld partners
— All non-oneworld partners
— All American
— American and a combination of partners

So I believe if you switch from all partner to something which partly includes American it incurs the fee. At least that’s the conclusion I draw based on recent data points. It’s still a fairly generous policy overall compared to Delta and United, though quite confusing.

Sorry for the confusion! :-/

All OW to OW+AA seems to be my case.

A follow up question: are the taxes calculated by AA always correct? I’ve made about 10 changes to my itinerary, either adding stops or changing routing; each change incurred some additional taxes. I recently changed a CX flight from HKG-JFK to HKG-EWR and paid $43 in add’l taxes, which really puzzled me. I’ve paid $271 in taxes so far, compared to $95 when I first created the itinerary. I start to wonder if that’s really the right amount.