cmtlatitudes

The traveler's confusion about seatmaps notwithstanding, I can personally vouch for some of what he's experiencing. At best, AA either has a completely incompetent team with a complete lack of understanding of the region they are selling tickets to - or they do but just don't care -, or a very poor scheduling algorithm based on distance only. Or at worst they are deliberately trying to misdirect customers who don't know any better to keep a sale and/or $$ as long as possible.

And before everyone goes Rambo on me, I usually tend towards being the dreaded 'AA Apologist". Or at least giving them the benefit of the doubt and a pass in most situations. But it outrages me the traveler and his family got caught in this particular SVD - ST. Lucia absurdness by AA.

I tried in June to book a flight -- for six different dates -- through MIA to SVD. Initially, four of the dates, the reservations screen defaulted MIA to St. Lucia. (My reaction was like "What the heck? You pretty much can't get from St. Lucia to SVD anymore. At least not quickly or reasonably. Not without booking a private charter flight. This makes no sense at all. What the heck is AA doing???)

Two of the dates I checked did have MIA-SVD availability at the highest flex fare $3039 (for F) but didn't match up with EF. It seemed like AA was either oversold or hedging their bets on whether to operate the flight. Over the week I was looking, (before I bailed based on the unreliability of what I was seeing), these flights went back and forth like ping pong balls. These were close-in flights -- not months out. Within the next 1-5 weeks.

But I had enough knowledge to know how absurd the recommended St. Lucia re-routing was. If someone had a week trip planned, you could easily spend 80% of it trying to get and from St Lucia to SVD. Used to not be as bad back when LIAT was operating. But now there are virtually no easy options. And nothing on AA partners where AA will have any responsibility whatsoever.

AA runs MIA-SVD twice a week, Sat and Wed. (Although occasionally they have changed it without much warning to Sat and Tues.) No other major carriers operate this route. If I would've elected to make the trip, it would have been flying Barbados and taking SVG air to Bequia. AA also has daily or near daily flights to both Barbados and St Lucia, as do most of the major players. Many more options in a pinch with BGI. However, Barbados never came up as an option. Only St. Lucia. Now perhaps because it's farther away distance wise than St. Lucia and the algorithm fails on relevancy. But it's actually possible to get flights "relatively" easily to SVD from BGI -- at least compared to St. Lucia -- but not necessarily without spending at least one night in Barbados first.

I don't often get outraged with AA. But they are the only major US carrier to SVD. In my mind, they have an extra level of responsibility and transparency to customers on a route and in the country where they're the only major player. Or at least that's the way it should be.

St. Lucia, Barbados, and St. Vincent are all different countries, with different covid entry rules, until a very recently. It just seems the height of irresponsibility and/or greediness for AA to try to sell flights to St Lucia from a reservation search to St Vincent.

Having routing to Lucia come up when I searched XXX-MIA-SVD completely boggled me. I actually thought to myself "I wonder how many poor saps are going to get sucked in and completely screwed over by this". That was my outrage at the search engine and AA offering up unusable options to other places they sell tickets. But at the end of the day, I guess everyone is responsible for doing their own diligence before purchasing a ticket. Somehow it never occurred to me AA would actually re-route someone on this itinerary though, for a ticket already purchased. Completely differently level of being screwed with no options.

Sorry for the long rant. This SVD-St Lucia switch really got my goat, because I knew how absurd and unworkable it is in practice. And it's still out there being offered. For some reason I can't get the screen shot to work. Maybe someone else can.

Don't take my word for it. Search MIA-SVD for July 16th or 20th on AA. UVF flights (St. Lucia) is actually offered AHEAD OF -- using default 'relevance' for the order listing --- actually two flights ahead of, the MIA-SVD July 20th flight. [[[ Huh??? It's very hard to give AA the benefit of the doubt when seeing that.]]]