Frequent flyer miles from original airline

For an itinerary in January ’08 from San Jose, California, to Dakar, Senegal, with connections in Chicago and Brussels, my wife and I were ticketed with American Airlines (AA). The initial flight, San Jose-Chicago, was canceled due to a mechanical problem. The AA agent in San Jose rerouted our entire trip, issuing new tickets for flights from San Francisco to Dakar via Paris on Air France. This trip involved a lot of miles, for which we wanted frequent-flyer credit.

Since Air France partners with Delta, I submitted our ticket receipt and boarding passes for mileage in our Delta accounts. Eventually, Delta advised me that they could not credit me for those flights since the tickets were issued by AA, which is “not a participating partner in the Delta SkyMiles program.”

This did not make sense to me, since, regardless of the source of the ticket, the flights I took were on Air France. I wrote to Delta again but got no reply.

After waiting several months, I tried calling American Airlines’ AAdvantage Elite desk (I’m a million-mile AAdvantage member). To my surprise, I was told that since this was a rerouting of what was originally to be an AA itinerary and AA did the reticketing as a result of their canceling our first flight, AA would credit us for the miles.

I was asked to fax in the documentation, which I did promptly. Some time later, both my wife and I received postcards with boilerplate language stating that we did not qualify for the mileage credit because “Air France does not participate in the AAdvantage program.”

I think we deserve to have the credit with either AA or Delta. We fully paid for these tickets.

BRUCE BERGER

Mountain View, CA

ITN sent to American Airlines (4255 Amon Carter Blvd., MD 2400, Fort Worth, TX 76155) on June 16 a copy of Mr. Berger’s May 30, 2010, letter, above, and received the following reply from Ann E. Barnes, Customer Relations: “I’ve asked my colleagues in our AAdvantage department to look into this matter for you… Thank you for your patience.”

A few days later, Mr. Berger wrote to ITN, “I wanted to let you know that today I received a call from American Airlines. The agent said that the situation regarding my mileage claim had come to her attention. She apologized for my not having received the mileage credit earlier, when I first requested it, and said that 10,000 miles would be credited to my account as well as 10,000 to my wife’s account.” Two weeks later he confirmed that the mileage had been received.