MJonTravel

What I think happened.....

Some wise alec in LGA who can't do things right went into your record and did a long-sell standby segment for the earlier flight, rather than check you in for standby on the earlier flight with the correct entry which includes your orginally booked flight number. If it's done right, you clear standby for the earlier flight, and when the gate agent working that flight puts it in PDC status after departure the sabre system cancels your original confirmed LGA-ORD flight ONLY. Because of the way you were put on the list (I think...) sabre doesn't realize what happened....it just sees that you didn't show up for your original itinerary and cancels the whole thing. This, of course, happens after you are winging your way happily to ORD with your connecting boarding cards in hand.

In any event, that's just one of a few possible scenarios that I suspect happened. I'll be interested in hearing AA's reply when you get it.

pdx1M

Think you have got it. The original agent at LGA check in seemed to have an inordinate amount of trouble entering the standby info - asked her next door agent for some help. Then while waiting for the standby at the gate I was on the net and noticed that the reservation on AA.com now showed a leg LGA/ORD (the standby) with no seats assigned and then a solid line and then a pair of segments LGA/ORD and ORD/PDX with seats. Didn't think much of it at the time since I just assumed this was how the standby appeared. Then they called me up and cleared the standby and the rest . . .

venk

1. The original error is, of course, a consequence of the extremely poorly designed interfaces to the ancient flight software that allows people one way to do it right (and not necessarily in the most intuitive way) and 10 or more different ways to do it wrong, including the most obvious ways. This is endemic in all IT processes within AA.

2. As people have explained above, that original error is why the OPs found themselves bumped off the plane.

3. The reason there are still human beings in this process is to ensure that customers are not stuck with a unforgiving computer endlessly repeating "you do not have a reservation" and unable to do anything. But computers seldom insult customers.

4. When agents aren't any more effective than such computers and in addition manage to insult the customers, one wonders whether one can really afford human agents.

james968

I don't know if this would be worth putting in your correspondence, but you might want to mention that so far 900 people have read your posting about this incident.

(What's that saying one happy customer will tell 2 others, an upset customer will post it on a internet message board)

oklAAhoma

My bad. I shouldn't have made that assumption and I'm glad to know it wasn't AA. It's also good to learn that the offending airline rectified the situation as much as possible.


You have summed it up perfectly.

millionmiler

Honestly, I'm not a Texan at heart and I don't own any boots.

I do think that AA should instantly fire people for poor customer service cases like this. AA is not a money tree. These people only have jobs because we pay them.

omegadeal

Just out of curiousity, what was the deal about booting the non-revs. If there were two seats on the plane anyway then it shouldn't have made a difference if they were booted or not. Maybe I read something wrong?

Anway, I was a non-rev once on a SWA flight that I was connecting on. The FA politely told me it was a full flight and I needed to be prepared to exit the plane at a momements notice if all PAX showed up Luckily there were a few no-shows.

eric_packer

Good luck pdx1M. I would think the restoration of your VIPs, perhaps with a couple more and some miles for compensation as well, and in any case a huge apology, would be a fair acknowledgment of a massive AA screw-up. The "subsequent segments may cancel if you stand-by for the first one" issue is comparatively well documented among those of us who have already been burned. But I agree with your assessment: the key factor is how a company reacts once they have erred.

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).

pedersontb

Start at the bottom and work your way up the chain of command.

Baeck

While the outcome may not be totally satisfactory, at least you got a more personalized response to your inquiry and a decent chunk of miles. It's pretty hard to cut a deal like yours with the standardized AA letter:

Dear *,

We're sorry. We promise to do better next time. We've awarded you 128 miles.

Love,
AA Customer Service
xoxo

AAND

Another person to consider for big AAdvantage problems: Kurt Stache, President, AAdvantage Marketing. Linked article is from July 2... who knows, this guy may have been canned already considering how a lot of us are treated. Not likely I guess, but at least we can dream....

http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/st...8/daily33.html

grouse

Is making inane posts to increase your post count to 100 a violation of the FT TOS?

pb9997

- Fortunately that requirement has been lifted. Currently to post in CC it only requires the member to be one month old. No further need to spam 100 posts or random forums...

janey

Nice of them to offer you miles but perhaps unfortunate that they didn't reissue actual eVIPs since the upgrade copay is now in affect. Would that have been a possible alternative? Or am I just not thinking this through clearly?