bedelman

Christopher Elliott covers travel matters on his blog and for the New York Times.

Today he posted a blog entry, EmbAArrassed, discussing the aainflightservice.com documents that were discussed here last week (link now leading to an error message, because FT staff deleted or hid the thread). Chris's comments: Chris goes on to discuss the fact that AA shortly removed the documents from his web site. He concludes:

aamilesslave

Zi paperz pleez.

_________________
Stand in the place where you live...

drtdk

As I have posted before (and was deleted), FT is a Chinese Democracy. Even more so now than it used to be. Not really a complaint. Just a statement of fact. It is what it is.

fly72

Not to worry, we've all saved the Flight Service bulletins and are about to post them on a different site!!!

justageek

Interestingly, I believe that if Mr. Elliott had posted that blog entry himself on FlyerTalk, it would be considered in violation of the ToS! (In particular I am talking about the first sentence of the last paragraph that is quoted above.)

skylady

I am curious, why would anybody be interested in our dress code manual? Was there truly something interesting there?

fly72

I think Christopher hit the nail right on the head:

"Then again, maybe the decision happened at a lower level, initiated perhaps by an overly cautious moderator."




I love the "lower level."

Fly AA J all the way

Actually, yes, there were other interesting things, such as cross-cabin visits, and row 17 on the 763, things an FA would not likely want us to be able to shove in their faces mid flight.

justageek

No one does. Notice that the main point of the article was the reaction by FlyerTalk--not the content of the documents themselves.

Fly AA J all the way

There was a thread a few hours later, someone looking for that original thread, to which Randy responded, indicating that he either removed the thread himself, or approved the decision.

JonNYC

Perfect. Good luck with that.

fly72

Or the part about the frozen shrimp.

skylady

Apparently somebody does find the content interesting.

gemac

Interesting. It the past, Chris has felt that travel industry providers should be protected from their mistakes by their customers. For example, if Orbitz posts a $3 rate on a hotel in Japan, the customer should not book it, but should call Orbitz to report the error. When assured by Orbitz that the rate is OK, and urged by them to book it, the customer should not do so, but should continue calling and calling until he gets someone who will admit that it is a mistake and agrees to correct it.

Despite the fact that AA has password protected their .pdf website, things in it were discussed in the thread referenced. Chris apparently doesn't feel that AA should be protected from this mistake. This may be consistent with his prior positions, but I don't see how.

bedelman

Actually, I read that document with considerable interest. I always felt like there was some surprising pomp to AA's uniforms -- put on a jacket for this stage of service, then take it off, etc. I wanted to understand the specifics, to better appreciate the show being put on for passengers' benefit.

On a more serious level, I was and am concerned that AA doesn't take adequate steps to provide flight attendants with adequate, modern, properly-fitting clothing. I've heard multiple AA staff complaining about exactly this. I wanted to read the rules to understand more about this problem.

Does this matter to most pax? No, definitely not. But if we're going to be victim of those FAs openly unhappy about their uniforms, who perhaps sometimes take out that unhappiness on pax, then we might as well have the benefit of the additional information that lets us better evalute their complaints.


Of course, as others have pointed out, the most notable documents were others -- pax right to cross cabin boundaries, pax right to stay in certain 767 seats, etc. These are significant rights, that some FAs unilaterally and apparently unjustifiably deny. Informed, sophisticated pax who travel with copies of these documents -- small PDFs on their laptops -- will be better equipped to defend their rights, or to escalate their grievances with AA after the fact.