I think I'll avoid the AA operations on the East Coast for the rest of the summer.
After some pretty serious delays last Thursday getting from the West Coast back east, I was hoping for smoother sailing when we returned to Seattle on Monday. I had ticketed our family of five out of Islip to avoid the chaos of JFK, routing ISP-PHL-JFK instead.
But as we are just about to Islip, our phones began to ring and beep with alerts that our ISP-PHL flight would be delayed, likely making us miss the last flight out of the evening to Seattle. I kept track of things that evening and indeed we would have been stranded in PHL for the night ( and I was able to learn that it wasn't a weather delay).
I called the EXP line to see about proactive reaccommodation so we didn't have to wait around in Islip for the inevitable. I saw on expert flyer that there were some seats on the 8:45pm JFK-SEA flight, including 5 seats in F (2 of us had already cleared into F on PHL-SEA). The agent was really helpful and since there was no one on the upgrade list, she confirmed three of us straight into F. We grab another one way rental from ISP and set out on the 60 minute drive to JFK. When we arrived at JFK I went to check in and asked if as part of our reaccommodation my last two kids could be upgraded to F as well. After a bit of back-and-forth with a supervisor, they agreed as a good will gesture to allow the upgrades for miles only-- waiving all of the assorted fees ( I think it would've been $150 each since the miles were coming from my kids' non-elite accounts).
It turned out to be a wise move pushing for the upgrades, as we spent 90+ minutes at the gate in JFK waiting for maintenance issues to be cleared and in the end we arrived after 1 AM in Seattle.
Overall a pretty good experience with AA considering we were on 3 separate reservations with only 2 elites and we all wound up in F ;-)