Wow, these are all really good points! Thank you!
Originally Posted by
TravelerMSY
AA is always quick to remind you that customs and immigration delays aren’t their problem. I doubt you’ll get anywhere with this.
Can you claim the hotel on travel insurance via a credit card?
I’ve had extraordinarily good luck over the years, but of course this was one of the few big trips I charged to the AMEX Platinum before they added trip delay reimbursement. I ended up writing it off as a business expense.
Originally Posted by
LondonElite
I have not pre-cleared at YUL, but many times at YYZ and, from memory, it seems particularly difficult to lose luggage in that arrangement. I'm curious how exactly this happened. Does anyone have any photos of the setup?
Don’t know much about the setup, but here’s a thing:
The officer pulled up pictures of each of my two bags and asked me to confirm they were mine. One of them had a green checkmark in the upper left corner. But the other had a grey X instead. Not sure what that means. I’m GE fwiw.
Should have gone into more detail on how it happened: My bags were tagged correctly, but were loaded on the plane without being scanned. (Someone mentioned that they had been having trouble with the scanner…)
So when CBP called for them, they were not where the system thought they were, and nobody bothered to look on the plane, where they were “hiding” the whole time. Only until I “no-showed” did they check on the plane to pull the bags.
Originally Posted by
Often1
My guess is that OP rightly pestered enough people that someone got through to someone sufficiently senior to override the system and either permit the rebooking at one or both carriers. Who did what likely is not easily traceable without a forensic audit and for all OP knows, whoever did it does not particularly want their actions to be subject to criticism.
There was certainly pestering! I could definitely see this, that one person may have been my secret savior here.
Originally Posted by
formeraa
OP, the answer is NO. You will never find out exactly what happened, because honestly it sounds like nobody knows exactly what happened. Assuming AA tagged your bags correctly (if you kept your bag tag receipts, you can verify this), then they somehow got lost in the airport luggage system. It is unfortunate, but things like this happen. It sounds like the AAgents worked hard to get you out that day, but AY was uncooperative.
I think this sums it. AY was hellacious. I hope to never run afoul of them again. I was really floored, because I had heard great things about their customer service, and figured a biz ticket with OW status would be better protected in the event of failures. In my experience, AA has always been great about fixing messes and protecting connections, so I’m somewhat surprised there too.
I sort of wonder if AY was hoping that AA would pay up (since they technically created the problem by losing track of the bags), and when they didn’t relented and rebooked my itinerary to avoid chargeback/legal action etc. Or perhaps AA did secretly pay after enough pestering and realizing they screwed up.
I’ve pretty much found peace with the fact I’ll probably never know what actually happened. But I definitely will be avoiding any itinerary that mixes AA and AY (or any airline and AY).
I also wonder if, had this happened at an AA hub and not an outstation, this would have all been tied up in a little bundle in a matter of minutes.