Phoned British Airways today to do seat selection, as their website wasn't recognising my AA status.

As a total nobody, with no BA status or even a BA FF number, I was on the phone with an agent inside five minutes. When she realized she couldn't answer my question, she had me escalated to an exec level agent in five minutes more.

This turned out to be a really weird IT glitch, so the BA agent asked for my phone number so she could call me back once she'd resolved my issue.

Twelve minutes later, she phoned back with not only my issue resolved, but an explanation of where BA's system had gone wrong, as well as concrete steps she'd taken towards getting it fixed moving forwards.

All of this took less than thirty minutes, and began with a recorded message saying "we apologise if our response is slower than usual, as we are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment".

Meanwhile, I call aeroplan and the phone just rings and rings...

Tell me again about the part where good customer phone service is difficult for large, multinational airlines?