[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.)