No worries, but I wish you had told us about Virgin, Spirit, and Kayak from the beginning. It affects the strength of your case with AA (and not to your benefit) since you were a walk-up passenger with no reservation history. This explains why I could not find an 8:35am departure on AA LOL!! Was your new AA flight to CUN a nonstop at 11am? I only see an 11*pm* (night) flight; please provide the AA flight #. This also confirms your outbound and return were on TWO separate tickets (no airlines co-ticket with Spirit). That's lucky- had it been on one ticket your return would have been cancelled and forfeited when you didn't notify Virgin and no-showed for the flight. (Not finger-wagging, just educating and providing info that will help). It's good you removed details about the missed flight...it only detracts from your point about the miscommunication of the fare amount
If the speculation that the agent sold a fully refundable fare is correct, I think the agent was right. @Dale Allen 's narrative in the very first post: "Ann seemed very frazzled and hurried during the process of purchasing out tickets, telling us several times, "We've got to do this fast you guys. If we don't do this fast you might miss this flight, too, and there are no refunds, so we've got to do this fast."
It sounds like it was coming down to the wire to ticket and check them in. At T-60 minutes, international check-in is blocked and the manifest is transmitted to Homeland Security. At that point, the ticket becomes non-refundable. The policy of all airlines is no refunds after data is transmitted to the government of the departing or arriving country. (If they had not checked in the ticket would remain fully refundable since no data was transmitted).
These are not valid 13-digit ticket numbers. Are they missing "001" at the beginning?
Kenish,
Thank you for these technical details. Very good to know for future travel, and you clarified several things I was confused about.
Sorry for leaving out those key details in the original post, and for the resulting search for the nonexistent AA tickets. You are correct that I omitted these details from the email to AA because I felt it would only weaken my case and make a long email even longer.
Yes: if you add "001" to those numbers you'll get the 13-digit ticket number. For some reason on my receipt the "001" are omitted, which is where I pulled that number from at the time of writing that email.
My ticket reads:
0012123406355
LV LOS ANGELES 959A FLT 491 ECONOMY
AR PHEONIX 11:36A
LV PHEONIX 12:50P FLT 1383 ECONOMY
AR CANCUN 6:40P