Well, it took two more visits to my local Sprint store, some light reading, a visit to a corporate Sprint store and online chats with both Sprint and Ting customer service, but I finally managed to change my phone service to Sprint and get signed up for the 25,000 mile AAdvantage promotion.
I won’t go into all the boring details, but the staff at the Sprint store were convinced they just couldn’t set up Sprint service on my unlocked iPhone. They variously told me that some unlocked iPhones just don’t work with Sprint, or that Ting needed to “unlock” my phone in order to let me sign up with a different carrier. Ting insisted that they don’t lock phones and that the only thing Sprint needed to do was port my number to a dummy phone temporarily, shut down my Ting account, and then start my Sprint account and transfer my number back over.
The Sprint staff at first said that was nonsense, that they didn’t have a dummy phone, etc. But finally, I got the staff to try what Ting said, and it worked. And they put in the promo code for the AAdvantage promotion (NAMRS_ZZZ) and later I got a confirmation email that Sprint was working on getting me those miles and I’d have ’em in just 8-10 weeks.
Here’s hoping it is faster than that, because I need about that many extra AAdvantage miles for my Hawaii/Australia trip.
Persistence!
The Miles Mom 