pdx1M

I sent a letter to the Cust Svc VP and one of his guys called me back and left a message. He appologized for what happened of course, particularly noting that had the agents handled things better these sorts of situations were really opportunities for an organization to show how well it handled customer issues. He said that the ORD and LGA stations had been told of the issue (LGA since that is where matters were originally screwed up). He then offered to put 15K points in each of our accounts - equal to what an upgrade would require. Now since I had saved my last VIP04s for the trip and would now have no chance to use those this seemed insufficient to me since in effect all it would do was to give me back my unused upgrade. So I called him back and explained this. He figured I'd have the reuse of the (unused) VIPs and that his compensation was above that. He understood when I pointed out that my Jan/Feb travel simply didn't provide an opportunity to use those so he went off to chat with the Aadvantage folks with a promise to call me back. That he did about 30 minutes later and we decided to void out the 2 VIP04s (in reality they had actually not been returned to my account and might well have not been had I not asked for them) and to then grant me an additional 30K for 2 more upgrade equivalents. So bottom line: my wife got 15K and I got 45K miles. Probably an ok result - not one that really wows me but not grossly unfair. As pointed out earlier in this thread, it retrospect we should have just let them close the door on us and then claimed the IDB comp of $400 per plus hotel plus meal plus probably upgrades home the next morning. That would have been noticiably more painful for AA but then we just wanted to get home. The unfortunate thing for companies like AA is that these kinds of incidents really do leave a very bad taste in the customer's mouth afterwards even if you ratiionally can accept the comp (as I can). Will I henceforth boycott AA? Of course not. Will I be much less likely to go out of my way to steer my biz to them - yes. From PDX you have to really want to fly AA since their schedules aren't really great and in the past I have done that once I knew my UA flying would be sufficient to be 1K or better. For at least a while I suspect I won't bother. UA has made it worthwhile to hit 100K + multiples of 50K EQMs now and quite honestly their Global Services service is way beyond my AA experiences (not just this one).