That's another very good point. AA is actually pretty good about compensating you proactively when things get out of hand. Looking at a history of their proactive compensation is actually a decent yardstick against which to measure the reasonable of a contemplated compensation request, IMO.
I was on a flight LAX-LIH that diverted to HNL after a mildly scary aborted landing attempt because the flaps wouldn't fully extend and the LIH runway was too short for the plane we were on to land without full flap extension. We zipped over to HNL and sat on the plane for two hours while the flaps were fixed, then we flew back to LIH and landed without incident. LIH is a small-ish station that pretty much rolls up the sidewalks after about 10:30 or so in the evening. A lot of us were worried about rental cars pickups, et cetera, but we were all pleasantly surprised to find that AA had notified the airport of our pending arrival and arranged it so hotel shuttles and taxis were waiting and rental car kiosks still open. I got to bed at my hotel around 1:00 a.m., about three hours later than I had anticipated. When I got up to watch the sunrise just a few hours later, 25,000 miles had appeared in my account, along with an e-mail apologizing for the inconvenience I had suffered. I was really surprised at the generosity considering that the delay, et cetera, wasn't all that painful -- and I had actually had no intention of asking for any compensation over the incident.
I too got the proactive compensation of, IIRC, 5,000 miles per flight for the power port thing on a couple of scheduled 763 LAX-DFW runs. I had six of them over a four-week period ticketed, but only got compensated for two. There was a thread here on FT where some people thought that was stingy of AA, but I thought it was pretty decent of them, especially since I never use the on-board IFE and rarely use the power ports on such short flights anyway. Again, I would not have asked for that compensation on my own, but I certainly didn't tell them to take it back once they gave it!
