Apologies in advance for the long post. I was booked on AA4132 from YYC to DFW scheduled to leave at 6:30 this morning. I had approx 8 hour layover scheduled before my 7pm flight to LHR. We boarded on time around 6am, then the pilots discovered a leak. They tried to fix it, but gave up around 7:30am and everybody deplaned. For the next two hours, everybody was told to stay at the gate just in case, but no announcements were made.

It’s now 11:05 and still no announcements. The only way to get any information is to line up in the lengthy line. Every hour, they add another hour to the delay. Meanwhile nobody is communicating with the front line staff who are trying to handle this gong show.

many people were rebooked via Chicago on the WestJet flight and told to speak to WestJet to get their onward boarding passes. WestJet couldn’t print them, so they were sent back to the AA line while the WestJet flight was already boarding. None of the staff really seemed to care that people were about to miss their flight (they were told to line up - those of us with longer connections let them go first), and in the end, several people boarded the Chicago flight with no onward boarding pass, no idea who to speak to in Chicago and no idea where their luggage was or where it was being sent.

Meanwhile, the delays keep coming, and zero information is being disseminated. The situation worked out great for me personally. I asked if I could be rebooked on a united flight via Chicago, where I seem to have converted a deep discount fare on an airline where I have no status to a full fare Y, in fantastic united economy plus comfort 😃 (if only I hadn’t already burned all my GPU’s for the year) and an earlier arrival into LHR. For others, the situation is not so good.

How hard would it have been to:
1. Get a status update every half hour and broadcast an announcement regularly?
2. Give everyone a food voucher, and let them know when they would have a spare 30 mins to use it
3. Pro-actively manage rebookings. You know who has missed their connections, and those who need to be immediately re-booked to save a connection. Call them by name!
4. Set a deadline for cancellation of the flight, so that people like me know if the issue isn’t resolved by x time, the flight will be canceled so we aren’t clogging up the line and know when we should approach the counter

i understand YYC is not a hub, and these are contract employees, but AA needs to do a better job empowering them.