The plane wouldnt have been held up an hour. Ive seen planes held up for a few minutes before, usually if the other plane is already on the ground and taxiing to a gate or already at their arrival gate. AS can rebook you on any airline they have interline agreements with, which is different than codeshares or partners and includes most major airlines. A lot of times airlines are reluctant to interline you because it costs them a LOT of money. AA agents at ORD will particularly play dumb if you are IRROPed there and act as if theres nothing but AA/MQ flights in the system. Sometimes if you dont ask to fly on the next available airline they wont even offer it to you. November I had AA cancel a flight on me 5 mnutes before boarding was to begin. Was automatically rebooked instantly to a next day flight. Was flying ORD to CWA. I said what about UA, she said I dont see that in the system. So I went to another gate and asked an agent.....She said sorry thats full too. Went to a 3rd agent. She was nice friendly and said sure there are seats, she took a few minutes and VOILA a 016 ticket was created and I received a 6 code confirmation code from her for UA. She couldnt print the BP but I was able to print it easy enough at a UA kiosk. What was sad was that the flight left with about 6 empty seats that some other fellow pax on the original AA flight couldve sat in.

Like Samuel said if its an airline controllable delay they give you the vouchers. If delays are deemed weather related then you get nothing. Airlines do everything they can to twist themselves into pretzels to create "weather" or out of their control delays. Partiularly larger airlines at their large hubs. Their automated computers go into damage control mode and will "swap" a/c and gates to make sure that irregular operations caused by them, cost them the least. IE cancel your flight X if it has 50 people on it even though your a/c is fine and sitting at the gate already and use it for another flight that has 130 seats sold on it, even though the original assigned a/c for route Z is the one delayed at airport XYZ due to weather. I cant ever recall or havent ever seen AS do this but then again Ive hardly ever had problems with AS on time reliability. Had a few times where I was on AS flights seated or about to board and the a/c was deemed not flyable but so far all those times were during off peak season and red eyes in ANC where there were another 3 or 4 spare a/c sitting around RON Some airlines its an everytime occurence of delays