I agree that AA has the best FF program out there however I think that I have finely had it with their customer service from the top down.

I have been flying AA by choice for the past 10 years or so (the last 5 out of BDL) and have bounced between plat and gold depending on my schedule. I don’t even shop the fare unless the cost from AA.com looks way out of line. I know that the service levels for all of the major domestics have probably dropped, but all I can relate it to is AA because I fly the others so infrequently.

Over the past two years I have seen their service level plummet! From GA’s that give you the wrong information (in one case it cost ME $350.00 to remedy) if they bother to give you information at all, to FA’s that sometimes can’t even bother to turn away from their personal conversations to answer a question or remember what you asked for, to FC cabins that would look bad compared to a New York subway car, to my latest fiasco; my wife and daughters canceled award ticket.

I reserved two reward tickets a couple of month’s ago and then purchased the same itinerary online and arranged seat assignments so that my wife would not have to deal with my six year old and lap infant by herself. I had some work to do and thought that we would make a vacation out of it. We show up to the beautiful ticket counter at Bradley to check in to the BDL-MIA-JAX 6:30am flight only find that while my locater was intact, the reward locater was canceled by AAvantage c/s without explanation. Now I understand that mistakes are made all of the time but it is what is done when fixing those mistakes that makes a company shine or look bad. As you could guess, the flight was oversold so there were no seats to be had. When I asked about my options, the Ticket Counter agent said that the problem would be finding award seats open. Can you believe that? I had to argue with her about how my family should be issued ANY SEATS not just award seats. So the agent has to call AAvantage customer service to have the award re-issued and the Service agent on the phone tells me (through the TC) that I have to re-pay the $15 service charge per award ticket! In the end they put us on a flight and we had to plead with flyers just to get two seats together, they did not charge me the $30 in fees that that wanted to, and they did not so much as say that they were sorry. Do you think that any of those people know why I fly? I don’t think so! I know that I only fly 50K to 80K a year, but AA is not going to get it any longer. Come next season I am switching. In fact, I read this thread because I have the same question myself.

Sorry for the rant…..