These are all issues that have been discussed previously.

AA recently walled up Customer Service by putting them behind their own "Great Firewall", so there is no way to call.

Sean Bentel is the Vice President of Customer Relations; I imagine his name is being used in some communications, but I'm guessing he's not spending time reading and dealing with consumer complaints.

AA has closed some EP service "desk" call centers in recent years. LAX, TUS, BDL, for example. Experienced EP agents were offered a choice: relocate to DFW, or stay and take home based international reservations positions (a la Morris Air). We have no idea how replacements were chosen, but some are awesomely ignorant of AA policies and rules.

And there's a pair of very active threads dealing with the new phone "enhanced" IVR and the "enhanced" much longer wait times.

We have therefore merged this into an existing thread after some searching. /Moderator