Most regular travelers, and travel agents, have gotten somewhat used to the drill on change fees with the legacy carriers. Whether they are fair or not, these fees are usually pretty consistent:
When any part of a ticket is changed before travel commences, the entire ticket must be repriced at current fares, even if it’s just the return flight. But when the return flight is changed, it’s generally just a standard change fee, as long as the same class of service is available. (Otherwise the difference in fare plus the change fee is due.)
It’s a regular occurrence in most agencies to recommend that clients wait, if possible, until they fly the outbound flight before changing the return, so they don’t have to pay the much higher fare to change the entire ticket.
Today, however, we ran into a policy with American Airlines that made so little sense that we called back three times. But it’s the AA rule. Getting it wrong could cost a traveler, or a travel agent by way of a debit memo, a lot of money.
As it was, it just cost American $100, and our client a few minutes out of her evening.
The client called today around 5 p.m,, and spoke to an agent in our office who’s been out of the business for a few years. She had flown out from JFK to San Francisco, and just wanted to go home earlier tomorrow. The flight in question looked open, less than half-full in fact, and had the same class of service available. But the agent wanted to double check on the penalty to be sure, and to verify what the options were should she decide to standby.
Now I figured it would be a standard $150 change fee, but it never hurts to check. This time, checking for new fees turned out to be the case.
The reservationist thought it was $150 at first, but decided to check with her rate desk. In case there were any new surcharges. A few minutes later the reservationist had a completely different answer.
What the American rate desk ended up telling us —
– Yes, this was a roundtrip ticket (from JFK to San Francisco and back, nothing complicated)
– Yes, she was changing the return
– Yes, it was wide open
– But, this was a ticket using two one way fares
– Translation, there wasn’t any rule that required each segment be part of a roundtrip.
– So, the return flight didn’t count as a return flight
– The traveler would have to pay the difference for a new one-way last minute ticket.
The total amount due, just to leave a few hours earlier was over $500, even though the American agent admitted her ticketed flight was sold out.
(In the JFK-SFO market, almost all the fares are based on one way travel instead of being roundtrip fares due largely to the increase of discount carriers like Virgin America, as they, like Southwest, have all one-way fares.)
Now, American does have a rule that within 12 hours of departure, a flight can be changed with a “confirmed standby” fee of $50; which the reservations agent, to her credit, advised us. The client, once she confirmed that AA were serious — she could wait about three hours to change the ticket and save almost $500 — decided it was worth calling American herself from her hotel.
I got the message from American tonight that her change had indeed gone through, so in this case it all ended relatively well.
But the incident illustrates just how crazy and haphazard airline rules can be. After asking around both with other experienced agents in our offices and a few who work elsewhere, everyone agreed that they would have reissued the ticket with the flat return change fee. (And probably been billed later.)
Many carriers in fact, have emulated the Southwest and Virgin America model for one way fares, but in general, a return flight, as long as it’s issue on the same ticket as the outbound, is treated as part of a roundtrip for change purposes once travel has commenced.
In addition, American could have had booked a $150 change fee, in easy additional revenue had they let us change the ticket at 5 p.m. instead of having the client call after 8 p.m.
The real lesson and the point of this post, is that once again, the only absolute consistency we can expect from the airlines is inconsistency.
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
