I'll give you that one. With AA's deval and now jumping onboard with BA in screwing oneworld pax, Star is looking better and better. You can actually find Star alliance award tickets every now and then too. What a novel concept!

LUS was fundamentally an East Coast, shuttle-oriented shorthaul airline. That type of market dictates a product around getting out on time (because a 30-minute delay on a 1 hour flight means the train/driving/connecting to save $ is more competitive). LAA was not this at all, and when we say that Parker's management team "has no idea" its exactly this - they haven't figured out how to incorporate the shuttle product onto a full-service network carrier, and they haven't figured out how to integrate the full-service onto a shuttle carrier. What we are left with is, quite possibly, the worst of both.

I think I have said this before but this merger is literally bringing together the worst of both carriers. Plain and simple.

And what's sad is that even with that padding, they STILL have had a hard time with delays.

I've had more problems this year than I can remember in a long time.

What's been sad is I usually find that service has been pretty good - once you actually get IN THE AIR. Anything on the ground has been very hit or miss - and much more often a miss this year.

As a side note - my last flight to CLT was delayed due to WX (as were most flights going in/out that evening). Of course, my onward flight left on time.

The AC people at the B club were pretty pushy on either putting me on UA (UA thru ORD as a kettle with a tight connection? I don't think so!) or trying to find a flight that had the same revenue bucket available. Yeah, I get that getting booked into F would be a bit much, but there was very little left. Is it a requirement that they book you into the same revenue bucket for WX?

I can understand that may be preferred, but when things go pear-shaped - why the aversion to just throwing me into a Y ticket and calling it good? I've had other agents do that. Is that the exception?

Sad when Spirit and express airlines beat you.

If there is, they broke it for me a couple times this month. But in each instance I called the EXP line at the first sign of trouble, and they quickly accommodated me (albeit with downgrades).

I would have bought that had Doug not worked at AA back in the day and ran HP before taking over US. Your statement implies that he came straight out of the 80s/90s US and that's not the case.

I think Doug's issues come from the fact that he's had an LCC mentality for a very long time. While that may have worked being the junior US airline in *A, it doesn't work when you're trying to run a much larger airline with a more global reach.

Doug made the same mistakes Smisek made in that he didn't work hard enough to keep enough legacy AA management in place so that they could work together as a team to bring the best that both offered. Instead, he took a somewhat softer version of Jeff's approach and still replaced a bunch of AA management with US management - and kept is ol' buddy Scott with him. So we now have a smaller airline used to do things that worked well in a niche market trying to apply those concepts to a much larger entity and market and it just doesn't work. The market and the beast are just too different.

I think my mistake is I should have went to the main AC rather than the hole in the wall. I probably would have gotten better agents.

Compared to what one AAngel did at the MIA AC for me to save my trips impacted by IRROPS - this was a very far cry from that service.

Definitely not-- very odd that they would have been so insistent about doing that.

Except for the part where AA wasn't exactly doing well pre-merger.

Many of the issues I had post-merge and eventually jumped ship over were the logical consequences of continuing pmAA policies. IRROPS happen, but mass strandings at hubs don't have to happen every time there's a drop of rain. They did on pmAA, though, and continue to post-merger, because pmAA's Baghdad-Bob routine has been left fully in place. Which leads to "on time" boarding and closing of flights which only get you to a hotel room for the night (and that only if you're lucky).

I've said it over and over: pmUS would start proactively rerouting people well in advance, or just admit there was a problem, cancel a flight and leave people at origin instead of overloading its hub with stranded passengers. pmAA would do everything in its power to pretend the flight was fine, it's on time, the weather is clear and beautiful, there's nothing to worry about... until "uhhhh... from the flight deck... uhhh... looks like, uhhh... DFW is in uhhh... ground stop for the next three hours, so we'll be uh.... sitting here...."

Last month I decided to give it another go and burned some miles on an SFO-PHL run in F. The 5.5-hour return flight ended up being over 10 hours gate-to-gate because the mentality has infected the pmUS side of operations now, too. Never again; I'll find some other way to spend down my miles, and keep flying DL and AS (and KL/AF for my TATLs -- no Heathrow for me!). Even with DL's recent network outage they're still light-years ahead on reliability.

MIA/PHX this morning a quick minor 2 minute mechanical issue is now running over 30 minutes with no word of why so long. Stranger is paxs keep coming on the a/c.

The exact reason this is happening is because of the rebanking of hubs post-merger. When most transfers were in the 90-120 minute range, these mass misconnects would not happen nearly as frequently. The post-merger airline is far worse operationally because of failed rebanked schedules than AA or US ever were on their own.

Today at LAX it was a 90 minute venture from landing taxi to Eagles Nest,wait for agent, wait for bus toT4. Landing 40 minutes early meant nothing.

I have a co-worker that is based in Melbourne, and regularly flies into LAX and connects onward with AA. Every time he has a AA delay, and tweets about it. He's SO frustrated he's now investigating other airlines to use that are actually ontime most of the time.