Originally Posted by
Often1
A simple recognition of the fact that the passenger is not always the customer. The guy who controls a multi-million dollar travel budget may have a personal travel spend which would not qualify him for Gold. But, you can bet that AA works to assure that things go right for him and that when things do go wrong, he gets taken care of.
The concept of a VIP is not unique to commercial aviation.
The discretion of the AA sales people who negotiate those corporate contracts is of course controlled.
Although AA may know that person who ultimately controls the multi-million dollar travel budget, does AA know the (potentially large number of) people who may have the ear of that person? At least in my experience, the world is a smaller place than you would think, and it's often not the people to whom you say something directly—but the people those people listen/talk to—who end up coming back to bite you.
Of course, there probably has to be line drawn somewhere...