[carlop]

Beware of using electronic tickets if you are flying on American Airlines and have a connecting flight on another airline. My husband and I learned the hard way. After arriving at JFK after 9:00 PM over 3 hours late on a 5-hour AA flight from LAX, the AA ticket agent at JFK spent 2 hours telling us not to worry - they booked us on their11:45PM flight to London using our electronic tickets and assured us that we would fly that night. At 11:30PM the agents told us they couldn’t figure out how to apply the other carrier’s electronic tickets and we would have to return the next day (Dec 20th) but there was no guarantee that any seats would be available. There were seats available on the 11:45PM flight but we would have to purchase 2 one-way tickets – at a cost of over $2,000 each. We were devastated but our European tour had already started so we purchased the tickets. AA then neglected to tell the other carrier that our flight was delayed and we had to purchase return tickets at a cost of another $2,000 each. Because we had electronic tickets instead of paper tickets AA charged us over $8,000 (in addition to the $1,500 cost of our original transatlantic tickets and the $700 cost of our AA LAX-JFK tickets.)

[Silent Bob]

Paper tickets are far worse than electronic tickets. 1) if you lose em, your pretty much SOL. They cost you more just to replace them 2) If AA were to send you to another airline, they would have to go through the hassle of reissuing new paper tickets, which again is more trouble than their way. Where as E-tickets are less complicated and reissues can be done on the quick. (I praise the day when E-tickets entered my life).

You guys ended up paying more money than you should have. First off if you misconnected to JFK from LAX on an AA flight, AA is responsible to rebook you without additional cost. I'm not saying it was directly AA's fault (could have been weather or air traffic). But they do have to confirm you on a flight out, not just their own planes but partner airlines as well, since it was their equipment that brought you in.

But the whole thing sounds rather confusing. If you came into JFK on AA and was going out on AA, which carrier issued the tickets that they couldn't fix? If the agent at the moment couldn't do it, he should have called in someone who could. I know United and Continental do it, I'm sure AA has a number they can call to help rectify such situations.

If this was indeed a misconnect, you should use their rules to get a refund for the extra money spent, because in no way should you have to pay for coming in on a delayed flight.

[ChrisH]

The issue here has nothing to do with electronic tickets, and needing to beware of them. The issue is that the agent did not know how to give control of the ticket over to the other airline. The airline I work for, has an entry I have to input, to give a person's e-ticket over to the other airline, so that they have control over it. It sounds like this agent did not know how to send control to the other airline. Obviously you probably did not know better, but next time, if they seem to not know what they are doing, ask for another agent, or a supervisor to do it, or, call reservations, let them know what is going on, and ask them to do it. The entry my airline uses is somewhat long, and even I have to pull out a "cheat sheet", to remember it, half of the time.

Trust me, paper tickets are something that I would avoid, at all costs. I've seem a lot of problems with paper tickets, including people losing them, which isn't good, as those paper tickets are basically money. Without them, you do not fly, period.