Rather disappointing experience transiting through PHL (FRA-PHL-DFW|-GRU) with an AVIH animal.
I`ve never encountered such utterly clueless, obviously untrained staff who had no idea at all what to do at any other AA airport - hub, even - than at PHL.
First, it took 50 minutes for bags and crate to turn up at baggage claim (all passengers coming off 701 were affected), turning this into a tight connection from a comfortable one.
Then, AA would not let us re-check the animal at the bag recheck facility right after customs, although the crate was checked through and properly tagged all the way to DFW. Staff there simply would not accept the crate and agents as well as supervisor insisted that I had to go all the way around the terminal and down to the main departure hall check-in desks. They clearly hadn't seen this before - hard to believe half a year after integrating with AA and adopting AA policies.
This would make me miss my connection as time was running short, but I had no other option than to comply. In hindsight, I should just have put the (properly tagged) crate on the belt myself while ignoring everybody before leaving very quickly...
Staff at the check-in desk were totally overwhelmed with this as well. No one seemed to have any experience with how to handle a passenger connecting with a checked pet. At first they wanted to go through the whole process of checking the animal in again with all the paperwork associated with that (plus collecting the fee a second time).
When we were finally booked on a flight (carefully crafted original connection was long gone at this point) , it was upon me to discover that this flight didn't work as it was operated by an A321 where checked animals are not allowed... so back to the counter again, and getting rebooked on the sole remaining B737 flight of the day - with a 40-minute time window to retrieve the animal, hand it over and then make the trek from A to D in DFW to catch 963 to GRU.
Next up: The agent mistakenly tagged the dog crate all the way to GRU instead of to DFW where it was supposed to go Luckily this was found out and got corrected before the crate was loaded onto the plane - the GA came on board and gave me new tags!.
This PHL experience ended with the flight to DFW being delayed, and everything turned out to be extremely tight in DFW.
AA, it's been 250 days since checked pets were introduced to the pmUS side of the company. Enough time to have staff properly trained and introduce proper procedures for handling AVIH animals one should think.
I can only advise anyone with checked pets to avoid PHL - and especially transferring through PHL - for the time being.