Yesterday I shared some details about our upcoming trip to Japan. I mentioned that we were flying from NYC to Japan on American Airlines. We booked using some of our miles.

However, I didn’t mention how many miles it cost us because it’s a bit of a long story.

Our flight was originally booked back in December. The flight from JFK- Tokyo in business class cost us 100,000 AAdvantage miles per person. We each received a Citi 10% award redemption bonus for having Citi AA credit cards. This came out to 10,000 miles being returned to each of us so now our flight was costing only 90,000 miles.

In February I called the AAdvantage Awards Desk looking for a flight with a later return date. If seats were available we would have two extra days in Japan. After some searching I was told that seats were available for the date I had requested in First Class for 7,500 miles more than the business class seats.

7,500 miles sounded like a strange number for an award redemption upgrade from business to first. I thought about it briefly and decided to change the reservation and extend our trip.

I checked my account a day or two later and noticed that 12,500 miles were taken from each of our accounts not the additional 7,500 like I was told. This was a difference of a combined 10,000 valuable AAdvantage miles that I wanted back.

I decided to call American and explain the situation. The representative and supervisor were both very rude and seemed annoyed that I called. I was also told that no reward of 7,500 miles existed. I then asked if phone calls are recorded and could be pulled up.

This didn’t get me very far so I turned to one of my favorite tools- Twitter!
I’ve always been impressed by the speedy responses from the AA Twitter team: @AmericanAir.

I started contact with a tweet: