Originally Posted by
redtop43
Let me give a little more information/perspective, as the OP may not be a regular AA flyer.
AA regularly posts schedules that are basically "placeholders" - as in "Maybe we'll fly it, and maybe we won't." Typically about 45 days before the beginning of the month, they finalize the schedules. So the March schedules are not really final until about mid-January.
(I've actually filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that this is an unfair trade practice, amounting to "bait and switch." However I also contacted a very high-profile consumer advocate who said this wasn't a ripe topic for a class action, which is his specialty.)
In theory you can get a refund if the schedule changes by more than four hours. Of course, what most people want is not a refund, but just to get from Point A to Point B as close to when they expected as possible. In general, if you call AA with a reasonable revised itinerary, they will rebook you. Of course the two main rules of dealing with a changed itinerary are:
1) Wait until reasonably close to the flight date, because you only want to rebook to flights that will actually operate.
2) Find flights you want. Don't call AA and ask "What can you put me on?"
As regards hold times, things are tough all over. I had two encounters with Delta last year; in one case I could not reach a person no matter how long I was willing to wait or what medium (phone or chat) I used; in the other a friend (an extremely inexperienced traveler) had to rebook due to a delay that would make her miss the last connection of the day, and a gate agent flat-out refused to help her but said to "Use the black phone." Me being nowhere near, I have no idea where the "black phone" was.
So I would say, if you can get a 4-hour callback, it could be worse.
There is a silver lining, which is that with fares leaping up and down, I've been able to cancel/rebook a number of tickets to catch a fare reduction.
Nothing is normal about the COVID era, and air travel is getting about the worst of it, next to health care.
This is very helpful context, and you're right - I'm brand new to AA flying. I was Southwest A-List last year but needed a more robust international schedule, and combined with the legacies granting change/cancellation policies similar to that of southwest, I thought I'd make the jump (and southwest isn't inexpensive anymore).
With Southwest, at least 30% of my flights had schedule changes, but most were insignificant, and almost none involved rerouting. Certainly nothing as outlandish as flying New Mexico to California for an overnight on the way to Puerto Rico. One primary reason I chose American was flight schedules out of my fairly small airport (ABQ). If AA plans on not honoring any of these and making sometimes already tough layovers flat out miserable, I may need to reconsider. But, to your point, this seems to be new territory for most airlines.
One benefit of the incidental schedule change, in addition to what you mentioned, is that even a small schedule change (at least with southwest) allowed me to rebook any other flight from the same city to the same city - even on a different day. Southwest plays the nasty game of one flight being $59 and the other being $459, so this often played out quite well. I'm not sure how fair AA is with their schedule changes, but this seemed like a good trade off, in reference to your FTC complaint - that if you break your end of the deal, try to make it right. I wouldn't sweat 10 minutes, but even an hour schedule change or itinerary change through a new city can be a big deal. A 7am flight is a very different alarm clock than a 6am one! Landing at 7p vs. 8:30p in a different country has implications.
Thanks again for your patience in explaining things to me. Here's hoping they get back to consistency with scheduling and get a little more serious about customer commitment.