<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Plato90s:
But what would you have the airline do? </font>
Where AA failed and continues to fail is in setting the attitudes, expectations and guidelines right as a corporation that enables its employees to perform well. I have found individual behavior from AA employees too erratic to imagine there is any corporate culture being promoted.
There was no such thing as "AA" doing anything in that airport. Various employees of AA were involved in their individual capacities. I have been in a situation at MIA where an AA employee directed me to an incorrect desk "just because she didn't want to handle my case". I would suspect that the ground staff at the second flight made their own decision to not allow this agent to board and it would be a cascading set of errors from ill-managed ground staff. This is a common refrain I have heard from several AA passengers when things go wrong (missed flights, baggage, incorrect ticketing, etc.)
What AA should be doing as an airline is to have responsible individuals at the airport who can handle these types of exceptions. The airline had the responsibility to either make sure that the Agent was denied boarding entirely because there was a genuine problem or provided a quick alternate to the initial decision. The reality is most likely that the Agent would have been simply asked to go to the next flight's desk and explain the situation and try to get on it. The second missed flight should never have happened and this is not "just following FAA rules".
AA really sucks as a corporation. I will not fly in this airline (along with some other badly managed airlines) because such a corporate environment breeds mistakes and some mistakes will turn out to be fatal to the passenger. The number of bad events at AA recently is not simply a coincidence.