[MENTION=10096708]Davvidd[/MENTION], you haven't offered any details on these experiences, but in general there are a few things to note about trying to get re-booked on other airlines.

• Passengers in J (and maybe PY) will generally get priority and better treatment, as will passengers with status
• A large part of the challenge in getting re-booked on another carrier is finding an agent who has the capacity to do it
  • When a flight is cancelled, agents often have a large volume of work to do beyond re-booking passengers on alternate flights - simply finding someone who has the time can be problematic. Keep in mind also that re-booking on OAL can be complicated and time-consuming
  • Contract staff at outstations are not as empowered as AC employees, and may not be able to (or might technically have the ability, but not be authorized and/or not know how) to re-book you on another carrier
• AC has to have an agreement with the other carrier(s) - they won't re-book you on WestJet because they have no agreement with WestJet, for instance
• For OAL, there can still be deadlines for issuing tickets and so on. For example, if UA has a flight leaving in 30 minutes that has empty seats, that's no good to you, because check-in has closed and AC can't actually book you on that flight
• Interline agreements may also contain restrictions on re-booking, and what's available for sale may not be available to AC. For instance, UA or DL may be willing to oversell a flight for new bookings, so you might see "empty" seats, but AC may not be able to put you on that flight because they can't cause/add to an oversell
• You need to be specific about your request, and reasonable. For instance, they're probably not going to re-book you in J on OAL if you have a Y ticket. Also, if the OAL option isn't much better than the AC option, they're probably just going to leave you on AC.

All that being said, you asked earlier for specific examples, and I can tell you that just back in March of this year, when LH cancelled my AMS-FRA flight (connecting to FRA-YYC), I had AC re-book me on DL AMS-MSP-YYC. BUT, that took 96 minutes on the phone with a concierge. Now, this was a bit complicated because she couldn't re-issue the ticket because even though LH had cancelled the flight, I wasn't off-loaded, so I had to go track down an LH agent to offload me. She was also initially trying to get me on an earlier AMS-MSP, but ran out of time to ticket it (due to the LH offload issue), so had to re-do everything for the later AMS-MSP flight. If the original flight had been on AC metal, which is what you were asking about, it might have cut the call time in half (eliminating the whole LH offload issue) but to my earlier point about the amount of time it takes them just to do an OAL re-booking, there's a concrete example of it.

I was successful in this case because I had concierge, which meant I had access to someone who had time and was capable of making the re-booking, there was no suitable AC alternative (AMS-YYZ was J0 Y0, and same for other options like AMS-ZRH-YYZ), AC has an interline with DL and there was space on the flight, and I had enough time to actually get this all done (for the later AMS-MSP flight, anyway), and I knew exactly what I was doing. The experience for someone in Y with no status and who just says something like "but I see there's a WestJet flight leaving in 20 minutes and they have lots of space" would be totally different.
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