This one is hilarious (or horrible) depending how you look at it, but in any case a good read for Friday.

A month ago me and my wife flew from London to Cancun, Mexico, with a stop at Miami airport. The stop, that was supposed to last a couple of hours, was prolonged overnight and to the next day due to AA’s negligence. Its probably the time to stress that: there were no weather problems, nor technical problems, just some (AA) management problems.

So here we go:

At first, the flight was delayed because AA wanted to send some technicians to Cancun to work on a different plane, but, as the flight was full, to do so they had to ask for some passengers to give up their place (first delay)

Then, already on the runway and accelerating, AA remembered that they had forgotten to remove from the plane the bags of the passengers that have left the plane (airline regulation and safety – hello??). so the plane pulled the brakes and turned back to the terminal to unload those bags.

And then, as a couple of more hours have passed, AA announced that it was too late for the current crew to fly and that we needed to wait for an alternative crew.

The time was around 2130 and no new crew arrived at which stage AA had offered (or forced) us to spend the night in Miami and provided us with a hotel.

I can continue the story and tell that even the alternative flight, on the following day, was delayed by a few hours, resulting in us missing almost 24 hours of our planned vacation to Mexico but I will pass on this one.
AA does not offer any direct mail for customer complaints and one can only approach them (online) via their website, which limits the mail, and therefore the description, to 1,500 notes.

When I first wrote my complaint to them (AA) I have asked for a compensation for the loss of our pre-booked hotel in Mexico (makes sense) and for the cost of purchasing 2 T shirts to start the following day fresh (our bags remained locked at Miami airport) (makes sense to, I think).

It took AA some 2 weeks to reply and when they did they gave a whole story on safety first (our plane was ok, it was another plane in Cancun that had a problem) and that we were not entitled to any compensations for our damages (I am not even including the spoiled journey). They did offer us, as an act of ‘good will’ (seriously??) a voucher for a future flight, of unknown value, provided we chose to fly AA (breaking news AA - that is never going to happen again)

In their no-reply mail AA did not provide with any option to reply and I had to turn back to their website and submit a reply via it (again, restricted to 1,500 notes).

Remember the cause of my complaint? (no weather or safety issue) – good –because here is what I received just now from AA:

"Thank you for contacting American Airlines Customer Relations.

We appreciate the time you have taken to address us with your concerns and for allowing us to review the situation once more.

We are so sorry for your unhappy experience as you traveled with us. There's probably nothing more frustrating than having to travel when bad weather conditions play havoc with airline schedules. From your description it certainly sounds as if the delay was aggravating and uncomfortable, and it's unfortunate we didn't do a better job of overcoming the many challenges we faced. We are especially concerned that we missed opportunities to lessen the effects of the weather disruption.

Many times we don't have too many options to help make such situations less trying. Still, your comments enable us to understand things from our customers' perspective, which is crucial as we strive for better performance next time.

Although we do whatever we can to minimize weather related problems, the many uncontrollable factors associated with air travel make some delays and cancellations inevitable. For this reason, and in keeping with airline industry practices, we cannot assume financial responsibility for our customers' personal time lost or for out-of-pocket expenses incurred as a result of operational difficulties.

We appreciate how hard it is to understand why a flight is diverted because of bad weather when conditions at both the origin and the destination are perfectly fine. Perhaps an explanation of the operational reasons will be helpful.

Bad weather the day before you traveled, or at one of our other hubs elsewhere, may have prevented our planes and crew members from being where they needed to be in order to operate your flight as scheduled. Or, in the same circumstances, there may be too many aircraft on the ground at your destination, and so we cancel selected inbound flights until we can thin out that traffic. Another possibility is that our crew members may have reached the maximum number of hours they can remain on duty as a result of a weather delay they encountered earlier that day. Finally, we may voluntarily cancel selected flights in order to reduce the length of Air Traffic Control delays imposed because of bad weather en route.

We have found it is necessary to take these varied steps in an effort to get our entire system back on schedule when weather conditions have affected our operation. Our goal is to minimize the inconvenience for the largest number of our customers. Still, we are sorry that our actions caused such disruption for you.

The next time you travel with us we will do our best to make your trip satisfactory in every way. We hope we will continue to enjoy the privilege of serving you and your clients."

(again - no-reply mail)

hope you are laughing. I am too. but I think AA shouldn't

G