Pretend you're going to sign up for the credit card, and you'll probably get to a human who can then (maybe?) transfer you to someone at the actual airline? As you've said in your original post — American doesn't care about any of their customers. It's just a numbers game. For every one or two they lose, they will undoubtedly get the replacement churn in new people being roped into the eco system. All of the "customer service" auto reply stuff is simply theatre.