This is a long rant, full of complaining...
My mom was notified a few months ago that she had some 80,000 frequent flyer miles with AA and since my parents don't use AA that much any more (they no longer offer a flight from our area to where my family's summer home is), they offered to let my fiance and I use those miles for our honeymoon tickets. Exellent!
Since my mom was the person holding the miles, she called and booked the tickets. We had planned on staying on our honeymoon Monday through Saturday. The agent my mom spoke to convinced her that we would be able to get both tickets free using those miles if we flew Monday through Monday and that if we did Monday through Saturday, one of us would have to fly standby. So while my mom's dealing with the agent, I went ahead and changed our hotel reservation to add those extra nights. Since the flights were going to be free, it was no big deal. My mom gave her CC info and paid the booking fee for the flights, and nearly all the miles were used for the tickets.
We're thinking this is all wonderful and I'm thanking my mom for letting us use those miles - then she gets a confirmation email charging around 1700 for the flights. We call AA and ask about it, they say they aren't sure why the agent told her that the flights would be free. They said miles could only be used for upgrades on the flight we want. To change the flights, it would be about $500, plus an additional huge fee to get those miles back. My mom complained to several people, and each of them basically said rules are rules, and we were stuck with those tickets.
So now we're having to pay an extra 1700 over our budget, plus the cost of extra hotel nights, unless we want to cancel the whole thing - which, if we did, would end up costing about the same amount because we'd pay the cancellation fee and the fee for the miles. Ridiculous. My fiance was panicking, we'd spent the majority of our budget on a fantastic hotel, because we were told the flights would be free.
I'm so annoyed, and I feel really angry that this lady didn't explain this to my mom and that AA refuses to look into it. I understand that rules are rules and they don't just give refunds, but at LEAST figure out who my mom spoke to and reprimand them for not being clear with customers - customers with a pretty significant amount of miles on their account, no less. Ugh.
End rant.