Last Minute Switch - AA to Cathay

Originally, we were scheduled to fly home from Taipei via Hong Kong - spending the night at the W Hong Kong before taking American's direct service from HKG to DFW.  After a late night celebrating 2015 at the W Taipei, we had a great lazy day walking around the city. We headed back to the hotel in the early afternoon and I before I checked in to our flight to Hong Kong I decided to check if there were any "better" options to get us all the way home.

Strolling around Taipei

Amazingly, I found two first class seats on one of Cathay Pacific's flights from Hong Kong to LAX.  After some discussion, we both decided that we had already had such a great trip, one more night in Hong Kong wouldn't make it that much better and heading home a day earlier would be nice.  So I set about making the change.


I needed to call American to make this change (Pro trip:  Skype works great for this internationally with free toll-free calls).  I ended up with a great agent who was able to make the change in about five minutes.  The great news was that we would be getting a pretty massive miles refund (285,000 AA miles) given that I had booked a standard award (210,000 miles each) and we would now be getting a saver award (67,500 miles each).

While the change fee ended up being $300 total, we were getting about $5,700 worth of miles back as well as saving a night at the W (~$400 USD) which we were going to have to pay for.  So heading home a day early definitely "saved" us money in terms of miles back and cash outlay.

Unfortunately, American decided (can't blame them really) to release a website and system update on 1/1/15.  So while the agent could make the change, she couldn't actually issue the ticket until the system was back up.  She said that would be done in 5-6 hours and I would need to call back.  Well that's not good we both thought.

We headed out for an awesome night at the Shillin Night Market.

Taipei's Shillin Night Market

Sausage on a stick

Poppin balloons

When we returned, I called American back only to be told they were still working on the system update.  An hour later, after another call and a few tweets back and forth, our tickets were issued.  We were both so excited to be flying Cathay First Class.

Last minute availability on a lot of routes is great if you are little flexible and patient.  We were able to "upgrade" our flight on the outbound (United GlobalFirst to Singapore First Class) for this trip as well by doing the same thing.