marketmaker

Just happened to me and my wife out of NYC. We were scheduled to leave tomorrow (29th) to SFO on AA 9 at 7am. I'm a Plat and had reserved this flight a while ago, and it was cancelled without notice sometime in the morning. Out of sheer luck I tried to check-in this afternoon and discovered I couldn't. We didn't receive an e-mail or a phone call and still haven't. I knew there was a problem when the wait times for the hotline were extremely long -- thank you FT for giving me the Oz AA number.

All the AA flights tomorrow to SFO are full, so we're taking the next thing available, via MIA on 30th. We were offered a full-refund but no voucher. If I hadn't randomly checked this afternoon, would we only find out at the airport tomorrow morning that our flight was cancelled?

JonV

Aside from funerals, I've never seen as many adults crying in one place as I did this weekend at SAT and DFW. One of them being our FA who was vehemently arguing with her pilot that it would not be safe to fly back to DFW late Saturday evening. (This was before the crew timed out and we were stranded at SAT for the night.)

Personally, while it was one of the worst IRROPS situations I've been in the middle of, I now feel like we were incredibly lucky, as we were only ~24 hours late to our destination. We even by some miracle got the last two F seats on the DFW-FLL flight (original destination was MIA, but the extra 30 minute drive hardly mattered).

In addition to getting in early for the rebooking rush (I was dialling the OSO number as soon as we landed in SAT on Saturday evening), I think it really helped to be OWE booked in paid F. AA seem to have their phone systems set up to automatically route you to priority lines based on the FF# in your booking, even if it's not an AAdvantage number.

By the way, in these sorts of situations my personal policy is to never get in line for reaccomodation/hotel vouchers. Rebooking can be done over the phone, and hotel expenses I can claim on my travel insurance, so I always just find and book a hotel online and go straight to the shuttles while on hold with the rebooking agent.

As for impressions from DFW: We actually ended up spending only about four hours there (the bulk of our delay was spent at SAT), but my main impression aside from the number of crying/desperate people was the extreme frequency of gate changes: Our flight was moved twice, and we noticed flights kept moving to/from the gates next to ours as well, and you could never trust that the gate displays were showing the flight that the gate crew was actually working on. Surely that's the last thing you want to be doing when there's already so many delays and crowds and frayed tempers everywhere.

ORDPLATAA

Flew GNV-MIA-ORD this evening. Had about a 35 or so minute delay on our GNV-MIA flight (mechanical). We had a scheduled 2 hour layover in MIA so no big deal. Our flight up to ORD had been showing on time all day. Incoming aircraft was late leaving MBJ. We had one gate change (D39 to D32) since there was a heavily delayed MIA-YYZ flight parked on the gate still awaiting a crew. AAgent at D39 was pleasant and helpful despite some really upset folks in the gatehouse. Same with the folks in the D39 AC. Helpful & still able to keep their sense of humor. Finally got loaded up and then weight & balance had to be recalculated and 5 standbys had to be offloaded after they had already boarded. Our flight had a standby list of 84! Quiets flight back to ORD once we finally took off. Since we were originally to depart at 8:30pm, this was a refreshments only trip. A glass of red, nuts and a cookie at that was all she wrote. Anticipating touching down about 60 minutes late - not bad considering the chaos in Chicago (a friend got diverted to Indy earlier in the afternoon and had to drive up to Chicago).

Last trip of 2015 is in the record books. I will be just shy of 125K BIS miles this year. And I start it all over again on 1/9 heading to YVR!

Jish

Generally solid advice - though the "A" line on Sunday seemed very hit or miss. There were periods where it was 20+ deep and not moving, but then I would check a couple hours later and there were only 5 people in-line.

swag

With the cancel due to weather, AA's only obligation is a choice of either a refund, or confirmed seats on the next flight that has seats available. So I wouldn't say they were ripped off, it's a personal, subjective decision on what it's worth, similar to a VDB.

I'm not sure what you found as possibilities, but if they were losing a couple of days of their trip, even if they got there for the game, they may not have felt the travel was worth it. I'm sure they can re-sell the game tickets, possibly at a premium, and as infrequent travelers, hopefully they can find good use for the voucher before it expires.

I think the overall lesson is that dealing with issues like this requires both persistence and patience - but most here know that already. It can be hard, especially for the inexperienced, to make decisions on the spot - but when talking to an agent either in person at the airport or on the phone means a wait measured in hours, then "let me think about it and call you back" isn't a realistic option.

1K-SFO

I flew through DFW on Sunday, RIC-DFW-SFO.

DFW-RIC (my inbound) arrived RIC on-time, around 11:15am. Scheduled departure RIC-DFW was noon, but we ended up pushing back closer to 1pm due to fuel loading... we were expecting a very long flight path, down to the Gulf Coast and then north up to DFW.

However: we ended up diverting to McAllen (MFE), along with maybe 3-4 other planes. In at MFE at 4:15pm CT -- and got a gate. Some folks got off to drive places in TX (I heard SAT and AUS). I somewhat expected the worst -- a long multi-hour delay or crew time-out, but we had a very legal crew and a gate (yay!) and were pushed back and airborne by 5:20pm, on the gate at DFW at 7pm.

DFW was a zoo, as others have reported. Massive lines at all gates and even the AC (I went to A, where I stood in a line for about 40 min before abandoning). There were some flights showing 7+ hr delays -- I saw DCA and LGA 1pm flights posted for 8:30pm departures.

I ended up on an 8:40pm DFW-SFO, delayed to 10:30pm -- all things considered, not so bad. Throughout the course of the day, I had been protected on three earlier flights (none of which I could have made because of the MFE diversion, but I'd been proactively working to ensure I was booked on).

My big takeaways:
- inventory is super-fluid: I would be looking at EF for DFW-SFO and simply refreshing over and over would show seats popping up, flights going Y0 to Y1 to Y0 to Y2 to Y1 to Y0 in the matter of 30 second spans... which makes it really hard if you're trying for protection, because if you see space, by the time you get an agent to help you, it's gone... I tried calling Australia AA, Twitter, and EXP -- and unless you happen to have an agent just when a seat would pop (and I tried stalling in my interactions just to see if a seat would pop up), you're out of luck... but keep keep trying... seats will pop up
- AA is zeroing out seats/flights proactively: the DFW-SFO I got on was showing F0 Y0 but had only 5 people booked in F -- they simply weren't making the inventory available to give greatest leeway to the GAs -- it meant many folks cleared upgrade on a flight that was ostensibly full -- and even in Y, the seat map looked really open (don't know how many folks were booked without seats, but tons of people did make standby, suggesting the flight wasn't booked to capacity in Y, either). Moving gate to gate for standby is worth it, especially if you have status and are higher up the list -- people are clearing onto the flights

My staff interactions were all really positive and agents seemed to be handling the stress pretty well. The Twitter feed was incredibly vitriolic -- pax vocally complaining, much of it unjustified, I think

ty97

This is a great observation. A friend (who was canceled repeatedly flying trying to fly to DFW and onward to LGA) was told that all of DFW-NYC was sold out for Monday (when he was rebooked into DFW after multiple earlier cancellations) and that he would have to standby. And that was true at the time (around 10pm Sunday night). But by 1am, a few seats at opened up, and through Monday (as other flights into DFW delayed, diverted, got canceled) inventory bounced around like mad.

An ExpertFlyer subscription is hugely useful during IRROPS like this. Be proactive, keep monitoring, and something will probably show up (so that you are not stuck for days)

MrAndy1369

Looks like my SMF-DFW leg today was cancelled. I've been rebooked for SMF-PHX-(DCA) tomorrow. Not bad, honestly, as I should now have more time with my family, anyway.

Dallas is really a mess! Question: what would the likelihood of SMF-DFW tomorrow (1:35pm) being cancelled, be?

wrp96

Today's cancellation is just as likely to be a remnant from yesterday's mess at ORD as the weekend mess in DFW. With both ORD and DFW open and improved over yesterday, I think you should be okay.

MrAndy1369

Hmmm. I was told by the rep I talked with that she strongly recommended PHX, especially given the domino effect that was effected on DFW/ORD.

Geauxtigers

I'd also take a guess that you'd be likely better with PHX over DFW based on the past few days.

I'm scheduled to fly PHL-CLT-BTR tomorrow on a milesaaver ticket and just saw the forecast for CLT tomorrow... I'd like to fly back earlier in the day (scheduled on the 6:30pm PHL-CLT) but it looks like everything is Y0 for PHL-CLT up until my flight and even Y0 for PHL-DFW. All DFW-BTR and CLT-BTR flights are Y7 so I'm wondering if what was mentioned upthread about AA proactively zeroing out flights is likely the case for tomorrow. If it is, does anyone think I'd have luck just showing up at PHL early (~10am) and trying for standby? I'd even pay the $75 for SDC but all E inventory is 0. Thanks for your suggestions/help!

cmn.jcs

+1

This saved my sister two nights in MCI. Was confirmed for the 31st, but around 1am a seat opened up going to DEN today, and she's now back at home. This was on UA, but the principle holds.

JDiver

No way to know. SMF-PHX-DCA should be much more reliable.

JDiver

I use TripIt Pro. In addition to the easy and very handy trip aggregation, I find the "alternative flights" function great. I can click and see altersnate flights with seats for sale on all airlines or restrict the flights displayed to specific airlines, nonstop or connecting.

goldengate

As a Platinum, wait times to speak with agents were 2 hours... I did have luck with Oz once and got a fabulous agent that re-booked my sister, but subsequent calls yielded agents who didn't even know the US airport codes and couldn't understand a simple one-stop itinerary (she kept confusing Charlotte and Portland, even when I said the city names and not the airport codes). Finding a seat in Expertflyer in a situation like this is useless if you can't actually speak with someone to rebook you... by the time I got a real live US based agent, the seat was long gone...