FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - AA bumps teacher chaperoning middle school field trip
Old Apr 12, 2019, 2:54 pm
  #8  
MSPeconomist
A FlyerTalk Posting Legend
 
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Minneapolis: DL DM charter 2.3MM
Programs: A3*Gold, SPG Plat, HyattDiamond, MarriottPP, LHW exAccess, ICI, Raffles Amb, NW PE MM, TWA Gold MM
Posts: 100,327
AA certainly prefers that its IDB stats look low and the GA might also have a more direct incentive to use VDBs rather than IDBs. I could imagine a GA just deciding to call an IDB a VDB instead, and I could also envision a GA trying to convince a passenger who has been IDBed that the compensation for a VDB would be better for the same result, namely the customer not being on the flight.

If someone doesn't travel often or doesn't know AA policies, it would be easy for that customer to be intimidated at the gate.

I wonder whether the field trip tickets were booked as a group, whether parents were told to just book their kids' tickets on these particular flights themselves, or whether there were several PNRs. If either it was officially a group booking or if there were adults and kids together on a PNR, this should have flagged the situation so that AA would have found someone else to bump. It's not obvious to me that the school necessarily would have used a travel agent experienced in booking group travel for schools. ADDED: The teacher had $472 RT ticket in basic economy.

ADDED: It seems to have been AA 4502 operated by Republic, with scheduled departure 10:00 pm from DCA, normally scheduled to arrive into MSP at 11:50 pm. On Friday April 5, it was a couple hours late. Flightaware shows an Embraer 175 with no obvious aircraft change to a smaller flight. The other nonstop is very early in the morning and none of the articles mention a sole chaperone managing a connection at some AA hub, so I'm tempted to asssume that this was the flight, although it seems awfully late for middle school kids, and rather inconvenient for parents who must retrieve them at the airport after midnight. [The other nonstop, also a Republic ERC=175, is scheduled for the morning, so the teacher shouldn't have still been at DCA airport at 11 pm sending emails to the parents of his kids.]

ADDED: Nothing here is a quote; these are my words and my opinions. The $472 ticket cost has been reported in various sources without attribution or citation. I looked at google flights, the AA website, and flightaware myself to do this "research" and I supplied the logic in reaching my conclusion regarding what flight the students took.

Last edited by MSPeconomist; Apr 12, 2019 at 11:41 pm
MSPeconomist is offline