Look, I'm not upset with the airline. Cancellations happen. I almost wish it had been weather related so I wouldn't have told her to go in with the expectation of having her hotel accommodations taken care of.

The fact of the matter is that they owed her a hotel room because the flight cancellation was due to MX. If she had been 3 months older, they'd have put her up in a hotel off airport premises. Their inability to give her a voucher to an off-airport hotel doesn't change their responsibility to put her up in a hotel for the night. If they can't issue a voucher to an off-airport hotel and they can't issue a voucher to the MIA hotel, then something's not right with the process.

The fact that it took 3 hours for the AA employee to explain the issue didn't help matters either.

I'm really surprised that posters are trying to construe this as somehow being due to my negligence when I was on the phone with her pretty much the entire time.