Originally Posted by
carlitos
...Well, she told me I was lucky she wasn't going to charge me for the change...
This is, of course, nonsense; you would never be charged a change fee when you missed a connection. Some agents are more pleasant and knowledgable than others. I would assume that's the case on AA, as well.
Originally Posted by
carlitos
...next trip to Colombia from the US was going to be with American, as they know how to treat a person that flies more than 100,000 thousand miles a year...I am going back to DFW and MIA for my Southamerica connections.
I don't really think that's fair, for a couple of reasons:
1 - You booked a connection you knew was risky, and you got burned. It happens. You could have SDC'd to the 8:00 flight, as someone suggested, with no problem. I don't know when your flight was first listed as delayed, but if they knew the crew wouldn't be legal until too late, they should have updated the status as soon as they knew it (if they didn't, shame on them, and if they did, shame on you for not changing flights at that time).
2 - You can't really throw it in CO's face that AA knows how to treat its top tier elites. You acknowledge that you have no status on CO, so why would you expect them to treat you like AA treats ExPlats? You could have likely status matched before the flight (you stated earlier that you were aiming for status on CO, and that's exactly what the status matches are for). If you had matched to Plat, you would have even been able to do the SDC for free.