It’s never simple

So we finally got our new credit cards in the mail on Friday, and not a moment too soon as the RTW tickets had a promotional 10% off discount until the weekend (April 12th). I was now set to go ahead and book our OneWorld Explorer tickets. I have been using the online tool to plan the stops and flight dates, so I already had a pretty good idea of what I needed to book. The only problem that I found was that the online booking tool was quite buggy so I actually had to talk to a person.

I called the American Airlines Round the World booking desk, but unfortunately they were already closed as they are based in Dallas (I think). No problem, I would just have to call them first thing on Saturday. When I call on Saturday morning, I get a fairly stressed AA representative on the phone. He explains to me that he can take the itinerary, but that I would have to call back later in the afternoon to book and pay for the flight. Turns out I wasn’t the only one to wait until the last minute to book our flights before the discount expired.

After some coffee and lunch I call back to confirm my booking. The guy on the line tells me that everything is set, all my flights are available, and that the total price would be $5k per person. $5k per person!!! I was flabbergasted, as I had specifically asked at least 3 times to different AA reps that the price quoted to me earlier in Pounds was the price I would be charged. The guy on the line told me that I had to live in the UK and have a UK Visa credit card to get that price.

I hung up and fumed for the better part of 10 hours that evening trying to figure out what happened and how I could work around this. I did not want to just pay the US price in dollars as that would add at least $4,000 to our airfare bill. We looked over the fine print in the technical rules document, and sure enough there was a screw-you clause that let them charge me the highest price:

“When travel originates in a country for which a specific local currency fares is published and the ticket is sold
in another country, the fare will be that published for the country of origin converted to the currency of the
country of sale at the bank selling rate. The resultant fare must not be lower than from the country of sale.
Exception: Not applicable for sales made and/or travel originating in Canada or when BOTH travel
originates and sales are made within the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA).”

Gotta love American Airlines for sticking it to their US based customers and charging them 2x the price for the exact same flights. The only think that I could think of was to either try to get someone we knew in the UK to purchase the tickets for us or find a UK based travel agent to broker the deal in our behalf. We had friends in the UK who could do this for us, but sending them 4k GBP would be difficult and expensive with transaction fees. We found some UK travel agencies that offer OneWorld Explorer products but it looked like they charged a 200 Pound commission for simply relaying our flight details to American Airlines. So be it. The travel agency was not going to be open until 11am London time as it was Easter Sunday(!) there… so I would have to call long distance at 3am pacific time and hope that with all the delays we would still get the 10% discount. I set up a skype account to do my long distance call (needed to set this up anyway), and tried to stay awake.

The funny thing is that I know that other people have done the exact same thing as this before with no problems: People buy UK RTW tickets all the time. I decided that I would to find an American Airlines booking phone number with a UK country code prefix and see if I could still book it myself. After about 20 minutes of searching I found the phone number and called. It was easy… I mean the whole transaction was done in 20 minutes and total cost was even less than the online price quote. This even included all taxes, fuel surcharges, and a 15 GBP reservation fee for booking with Tatyana, the pleasant booking agent in London. Total price: 4111 GBP ($6,150 USD) for 2 people for a 16 segment flight around the world. Not a bad deal. We were even able to sneak in and get the 10% discount on its last day. So it’s REALLY official now… we are almost set to begin.

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