Questions and Answers

I had an award flight I booked quite a while ago (DFW-DOH-CMB-MLE) in business class. However, Qatar ended up cancelling the DOH-CMB leg as Sri Lanka remains closed. They cancelled this relatively close to my travel date, and now there is of course no availability in business on any of the flight segments as Qatar cancelled the DFW-DOH leg as well so as to not leave a disjointed itinerary. Not only that, but Qatar did not rebook me onto the next available flights and instead informed me that I need to reach out to AA as the ticket was booked on AA miles. AA is not seeing any business availability for any segments now. Do I have any options or is economy really the only one?

If anyone is curious (perhaps could help someone else), in these kinds of cases, AA should reach out to the OneWorld Liaison to ask Qatar to open more award availability to put you back on the flight that was not supposed to be cancelled. Whilst not a guarantee, AA seemed optimistic that they normally reinstate the ticket on that specific segment in the specific class of service.

It happened to me a couple of times. And in my case, the destination or flights weren’t closed / cancelled. It was an Award ticket on Qatar business class. I feel there’s something fishy going on . . . AA shows Qatar flights for better brranding of their award tickets, but Qatar just cancels them to favor paying customers. In my case, AA just said that Qatar is not agreeing to, and Qatar wasn’t even courteous enough to respond to my complaint.