Yes, for us, that was the problem. We went to FLL out of NYC for a friend's daughter's Bat Mitzvah a couple of years ago. It became an all-day ordeal each way, as we had to fly through CLT, in January, and there were delays. Last year, we flew to FRA on AA. Yikes. JFK to CLT to FRA on the way over. Meh. On the way back, we made the, as it turned out, huge mistake of being in Turin the day before our flight back. We had a flight back from Turin on LH at 1:00 pm the afternoon before. Plenty of time, right? Wrong. All flights from Turin to FRA got cancelled.

We caught the first flight into FRA the following morning, but FRA is huge, and we just missed the CLT flight by ten minutes. AA put us on the flight into PHL, which was perfect, timing wise. Arriving into PHL was not wonderful. PHL was a madhouse of an airport, where no one seemed to know anything ("Where is the Admiral's Club?" "Huh?") and delays were the order of the day (Our commuter flight into JFK was delayed by several hours; the gal sitting behind us had to take a flight into MAD and was not going to make it; we were told in the AC that these flights are routinely delayed out of PHL by several hours). We could not believe that this is how AA welcomes passengers into the US.