Good news regarding our American Airlines tickets

We had good luck with American Airlines as well. Our flight was cancelled and about 6 weeks later we were emailed that our refund requests had been completed. We had to apply for each individual ticket and our extra leg room seat charges were also refunded back to the credit card.

Glad you are glad. I’m assuming your cancelation was not eligible for a refund. If it is, go after it. American is in big trouble. They started the year with more debt than any US airline and have been bleeding about $70 million per day. This from a recent CNBC article speaking about AA’s attempts to stay in business:

J.P. Morgan airline analyst Jamie Baker said the airline’s plan didn’t go far enough and that “management is taking an increasingly perilous, knife’s edge approach in hoping to ride out the crisis.

“Put differently, current liquidity and further liquidity options appear increasingly insufficient to weather much less than a fairly robust recovery in passenger demand, in both absolute terms and relative to peers,” he wrote.

I have one AA bond in my portfolio. It goes out to bid every day since mid-March. No buyers, not a one. I hope your credit will hold up better than my bond!

Thanks, Alan, for this info. I didn't know that they were doing so poorly. Our tickets were expensive domestic travel tickets, and they are non-refundable. I guess there is no hope of getting a refund if they are non-refundable, but does anyone think otherwise?

This gets complicated where refunds are involved.

If the flight was canceled by AA, they are required to offer a refund to all passengers still scheduled on that flight when it was cancelled if requested by the passengers. Their other allowed options are put the passengers on a different flight or offer a voucher. If you cancelled your ticket while the flight was still scheduled to go, all you are allowed is the voucher for a non refundable ticket.

AA seems to make it extremely difficult to get the refund even when they undoubtedly owe it to you requiring phone calls and multiple online forms to fill out, all the way saying you should just take the voucher. At least they have extended the voucher expiration to hopefully allow you to use it in the future.

My husband purchased an AA ticket through a 3rd party to go to Costa Rica in November. How far in advance does the airline cancel their flights, and when is that posted? Right now he tries to check flight status on their website, it only shows for the next 3 days, not in the future.

Not sure if he’s doing something wrong, or if they won’t show cancellations so you are left in limbo right until a few days before departure.

That's exactly whaat 'flight status" is, the status of flights about to fly, and not their whole schedule..

He should check his ticket by the record locator on AA. If he does not have one, that is yet another reason for buying directly from the airline, instead of a middleman, ands he needs to get that from the middleman pronto. That will show immediately if the flight has been changed (AA is not notifying by email of changes even to those who book directly.) And he can also do a phantom booking for the scheduled flight, that will tell if they are still selling tickets or the flight has been removed.

Thanks Larry. He did say he won’t be using a 3rd party again.

I’ll have him look at the locator and see what he finds out.