OT: redeeming airline/credit card miles

[Climb01742]

oh my god. yesterday spent a long frustrating :crap: time on the phone with american airlines trying to use miles to get the tickets for our family vacation this june. it was insane. it felt like highway robbery. trying to get three tickets on the same plane at the same time without going through at least one or two connnecting cities seemed nearly impossible...or it would cost me an ungodly number of miles. this is the first time i've tried doing this. is it always this hard? is there a trick to this?

are other airlines as bad? i also have points on delta and united. does anyone know if they're any better?

this was a visa/american airlines card. is it easier to redeem amex points? got some of those too.

all these years i've been saving points/miles i never knew they'd make it this hard to redeem them. yikes. :eek:

[happycampyer]

Sorry to hear that. My experience redeeming Amex points for travel related items (mostly hotels) has always been great.

[e-RICHIE]

Sorry to hear that. My experience redeeming Amex points for travel related items (mostly hotels) has always been great.



same here wrt my chase platinum points for travel, hotels, and van rentals atmo.

[Climb01742]

thanks, good to hear. i'll try amex today.

[victoryfactory]

Possible things that make redeeming tough:

Airlines allocate only a few seats for miles
redeeming customers so they have to search around the computer for
availability vs full fare seats which they can't give you. Some airlines
(Delta) will allow you to take those seats for an additional amount of miles.

Are all of your flights on the original airline, or are they having to use
"partner" airlines. That makes the seats available even fewer and often
incurs up to a 50% extra mileage cost.

Most likely the complexity and dates of your trip are what is giving you
this problem. You may have found it hard to book even if you were paying.

The era of nonstop city to city flying has largely ended. Most US
airlines use hubs extensively to make sure they always have full planes.
That is the case whether or not you use miles.

See if some of the "partner" airlines who honor your miles have better flights,
but you may have to use more miles

Good luck
Be persistent

VF

[Climb01742]

interesting update. yesterday (being a sunday, i guess) i spoke to someone in india. this morning i decided to give american airlines one more try (i have so many miles on them). i got a wonderful woman in dallas. it was night and day different. i guess you can't out-source kindness or the willingness to help. i told her about my experience yesterday. she said she hears that a lot. upshot: flights all booked. going out in non-stop, coming back changes at o'hare. best all of, it will cost me half the miles the person on sunday tried to charge me.

it was a fascinating experience. today couldn't have been better. yesterday couldn't have been more frustrating. was it just two different people? two different systems? can't make generalizations based on just two data points, but they woman this morning really tried to help. she was sweet and human.

one generalization i think is inescapably true: customer service is all about one person treating (or not treating) another well. i told the woman this morning a number of times how much i appreciated her help and attitude. she made my day. i hope in a small way i helped hers.

[zmudshark]

Sounds familiar. I made three calls to USAir and got connected to an overseas phone desk each time...no go.

I finally just went to the airport and was able to get everything I wanted done with ease.

With this economy, maybe some phone centers will be moving back to the USA, wouldn't that be something!

[djg]

Many are a pain. Our card is good for most domestic airlines and I actually did ok booking tickets for the family for spring break a few days ago. 30K miles per RT ticket to SLC bagged us 3 non-stop flights that were pricing out at about 450 bucks each on a couple of the travel web sites. We bought two more off the miles people for the same price -- they hit us up for 20 bucks for each of the two non-miles tickets, but it was worth it to have the whole family on one reservation. If the tickets had been coming up at 502 bucks instead of 451, we would have been out of luck, as the 30k miles is only good for tickets up to 500 bucks.

[KeithS]

I always suggest feedback, you are exactly right. One person empowered to help, one person given rules to follow. The metrics of the outsourced contact center don't allow deviation. It's all about the service level agreement, how fast the phone is answered, how much cost did they "contain". It sounds like on the weekend Customer Service (at AA) is the name of a department, not a job function.

For the last 20 years I have been in telecom, providing telphony and self service solutions to contact centers. It is always incredible to me how really good technology can be so easily foiled by bad policies, procedures, grumpy or uninformed agents etc...

Glad to hear you had a good resolution to your problem. I live in the Twin Cities and we have been held hostage by NWA and now Delta for many years. One of the things I learned about spending frequent flyer miles is plan ahead. Way ahead. I booked our Florida spring break trip in August. Still had to use 50K miles for each ticket. Airfare price wars are making that bargain a little less so.

Call customer service at American or try and find the VP responsible for customer service. Easiest way is call the call center you got helped at and ask for a supervisor. When you have something nice to say you would be surprised at how fast they can transfer a call. I have sent emails to the president of a company praising customer service. Got a nice email back too, the really good agent who was so helpful got some good $ recognition. They need to know what they suspect - good service costs little, they almost lost you as a customer, someone pulled you back. Have fun on spring break!