qukslvr619

Background
5 of us (me, wife, 3 kids) we’re headed to OGG on 09AUG on AA 119 (itinerary was STLDFWOGG). Flight was initially delayed from sked departure at 11AM but after subsequent delays, and agents saying it was going to cancel, despite ops reposting later departure times, ultimately xld.

Granted AA had no control over the fires, and I feel for the people who were stranded in OGG and those that endured losses, our situation pales in comparison since all we lost was a vacation and spent a few days in DFW. But the overall AA experience was terrible and over the summer I’ve noticed it’s getting worse. Specifically the gate agents working the flight were downright hostile*, despite no pax’s really acting out, yelling etc. They asked for answers and it was a complete mess at the gate……agents telling people to go to service counter, only for the service counter to make an announcement through the terminal saying the flight wasn’t canceled telling people go back to the gate. The agents at that point told everyone all luggage was being sent to the carousel and go to the website for help/refunds, and just walked off refusing to help people with either finding a way back home or be rebooked for another routing/day.

We made the best of it and attempted to wait it out for a day, checking into the Gaylord Texan and letting the kids go to the water park. Next day it looked like 119 would go, but owing to multiple emails from AA discouraging travel, and the fact that other family members were currently in OGG awaiting our arrival and being told by the hotel staff they needed to vacate as many rooms for evacuees, we decided to scrap plans altogether and head back home. Spent about 3+ hrs waiting for agents, nothing available back to STL on Thursday 10AUG and best we could get was going home Friday night and even that was an extra $600 since it was repriced as STLDFWSTL instead of STLDFWOGG. Then had to call back and wait another 2 hrs because they had rebooked a
duplicate segment for an earlier flight and I didn’t want to risk being a “no show” and having our planned flight home xld.

Waiver Questions
When I inquired about canceling/refunding return (on a separate PNR) per the waiver and indicating it specifically stated “refund” as an option, agent said she would notate record about the xld outbound but all she could do was xl and I would have a flight credit but then have to submit refund request. Granted I bought J outright on the return for all of us, so ~$7000 isn’t something I just want to leave on the table with AA. Submitted the request yesterday and today I get an email from AA saying they issued me a “trip credit” (in lieu of refund). When I tried to resubmit, the ticket number shows “refunded” but there is no additional action I am able to take with that ticket number within the screen. Has anyone run into this issue with AA not issuing refunds despite waiver indicating otherwise? Or have any success/suggestions on how to resolve or escalate further?

General Agent Interactions
*The tone of the agents was evident even before the flight got delayed/xld. Earlier, 3/5 cleared into Business as I requested mileage upgrades; we were all on the same PNR and were listed sequentially 1-5 but noticed later that the other 3 pax dropped to end of upgrade list. Upon checking in, agent said he made a mistake and downgraded my son, instead clearing someone with lower status (and additional person on same PNR) listed below us. When I inquired further he said only one other person can carry your status, which is contrary to what Elite desk, AAdvantage and AC agents informed me about with respect to award mileage requests. My intial
thought was he was confused thinking about comp upgrades vs mileage. He said “it’s all automated we have no control”, to which I said well if that is the case then clearly there wasnt a mistake clearing my son….the computer processed the upgrade and now you are manually removing him from the seat. I called a supervisor over, he had no good explanation, but basically shrugged his shoulders saying it was the other agent decisions. So not going to leave my 7 year old alone, he gave me no other decision but to just put us back in Y; of course at that point our seat assignments had been given away and he was about to just dismiss me until I made sure that we were all seated together.

Upon checking in for our return flight they insisted we use a kiosk even though I was certain we needed an agent to help. Agent comes over gets an error message and has me go through process again. Same thing. She then takes me over to two other kiosks and can’t get it to work. She then walks me over to the Priority line and tells me to wait for an agent. We showed up at 2040 for a 2200 flight but between the kiosks and waiting in line, 30 addl minutes passed and I’m waiting for agent to tell me I’m trying to check in luggage too late. That doesn’t happen but for the next 25 mins she’s insisting I need to pay for bags because she isn’t able to figure out how to check 4 bags amongst the 5 passengers despite being military/having AA credit card/Platinum Pro which on its basic interpretation allows up to 4 people in the same PNR one free checked bag. Supervisor comes by and tells her there is no charge but starts working with another customer and she fiddles with it again until he finally comes over and walks her thru the screen. At this point it’s now 2130 as we got thru security and eventually made it down to the flight. It wasn’t a full AA sh*tshow until we went to collect our bags and came to the realization that one of the car seats wasn’t even loaded on the flight. I attempted to communicate this to the baggage office initially, but they insisted it would be sent up on the other carousel. Turns out they didn’t realize I had two car seats because they were looking at the wrong bag tag. Of course flight was late out of DFW to begin with so landed at midnite, and between waiting extra time for the car seat (that I knew was still in DFW) getting line to file claim, and then dealing with parking shuttle mess, we got home at 0230

Yep gonna write off this vacation from the books, hesitant to even try doing it again.

npretnar

This is quite the manure festival! It sounds like you have multiple claims for “refunds” and “reimbursements” which are valid to varying degrees.

First, with regards to the refund request for your original routing STL-DFW-OGG, what do you see when you enter the original ticket numbers into here (not the new tickets numbers after any confirmed C upgrades have cleared): https://prefunds.aa.com/refunds/? If it says “refund issued” or something similar and you are still seeing trip credits, it’s just AAs system lagging behind. In 5-10 biz days you should see the Trip Credit fall off and the refund posted to your original payments. I have had several experiences with this and it usually happens fairly quickly as long as your tickets are eligible for a refund, which in this case due to the waiver they seem to be.

Second, when the upgrade SNAFU happened, we’re you refunded the copay and miles you paid? Getting a refund for this is going to be a bit trickier.

Third, You should not have had to pay to take a new DFW-STL flight once your journey had already started and the travel waiver was issued. When you expressed an interest to forego travel, AA should have put you on a flight home to begin with. I understand you wanted to secure tickets, and I assume we’re frustrated with poor customer service either in person or on the phone, so you went ahead and purchased flights to begin with. Ideally, AA would have put you on that flight, modifying your original routing and sent you home free of charge, as by contract they were responsible to get you to your final destination, however a travel waiver (along with DO NOT TRAVEL recommendation) was issued after the journey began, and so they would logically be responsible to return you to the starting point of your trip.

Having said that, it’s going to be hard to get AA to cover the cost of your return. But, if you reach out to customer service directly (DM me and I can give you an actual person with a direct email address), I imagine you can eventually get them to issue you some trip credits at a minimum for this. It may take some time, but explaining things thoroughly without complaining about attitudes of the (obviously indifferent, possibly incompetent?) agents you dealt with usually gets your further with the actual AA customer service higher ups from my experience. Feel free to DM me and I can walk you through it. I’ve had success with very strange situations like this before being made whole.

qukslvr619

Thanks I will DM you separately. But with regards to the return flight, I did not purchase new flights. I indicated to the agent about a "trip in vain" but she only offered to move the DFWOGG flight to a new date (as if I could randomly just pick a date knowing when the Maui infrastructure would be rebuilt and could handle tourists), no offer of just booking us on a flight back to STL. Instead she said she could apply the value of the unused DFWOGG segment to a new DFWSTL flight (so basically a walkup fare/no advance purchase) and I would have to pay any fare difference. This was all on the same PNR so I'm sure AA could see the history, and maybe they might at least offer some sort of travel credit for the difference, but I do recall one of the gate agents announcing (yelling) that they would only rebook people who had a return flight on the same reservation since that value could pay for a flight home, but for the unused flight to OGG we would have to submit a refund request on aa.com. So I don't know if AA did away with the "trip in vain" scenario or what but this seemed to be multiple (misinformed) agents communicating what they thought they should do vs what policy has been.

I still would like to find out the official policy with regards to clearing people on mileage upgrades though. If all on the same PNR, wouldnt they all clear at the status of the account the miles are coming out of? I'm still trying to figure out the random "sophies choice" of how they determined one son would be upgraded over the other.

npretnar

I feel like if you would have called the PPro line, you may have gotten a different answer, and they probably would have just sent you home. Yet, at the time of the travel waiver AA was allowing anyone to complete their trip, without penalty, by August 25 or something, but those were the conditions of the waiver (it said nothing about allowing you to return home if you had already begun your journey nor does it say anything about it now). It was, of course, issued before anyone realized how bad this was going to be. It appears the GAs were just following the travel waiver guidance at the time, which wasn't generous enough. The travel waiver still has not been extended, which I think is crazy, given the situation on the west side of Maui is going to take months to recover: https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/travel-alerts.jsp.

Your situation is a bit nuanced since you had already started your journey. IMO AA should have made reasonable accommodations to return you home, but that's just an opinion. Instead, they are treating this like any other travel waiver for a snow storm or something, even though this situation is much more extreme. I imagine you may have better luck with customer service. I also suspect AA may extend the waiver and narrow it to just Maui, since right now it covers all Hawaii destinations. They will probably wait until August 25 or so to extend it though. It's a fluid situation, so you may have better luck waiting a bit to see if AA actually does extend the travel waiver and then pleading your case by justifying it against the fact that the original waiver was not accommodative enough, in retrospect given the circumstances, which is why you decided to return home rather than wait to continue your trip to Maui.

You can only upgrade one companion on your reservation at your status level. Lucky at OMAAT has a good rundown of AA upgrade policy: https://onemileatatime.com/guides/am...nion-upgrades/. What this means is that since you were using confirmed upgrade space (miles + copay), you could waitlist one companion at your status level. All other companions could then be placed on the upgrade list (because they are using upgrade instruments, i.e. miles + copay or SWUs), but they would be placed on the list after all elites requesting upgrades. It appears that you should not have been able to upgrade your whole family ahead of other elites, but you should have been able to upgrade one member of your family at your status level. The original agent who allowed you to skip elites on the waitlist for your other companions made a mistake, and it appears that other AA agents caught it and rectified it.

355F1

We had a trip to OGG planned for 8/25. They did not offer any refund or ability to change to another island without incurring a cost for the more expensive fare.

They were only offering free changes up til 3 days out.

Morally, I couldn't go to Maui when they could offer my hotel room (right next to Lahaina) to the displaced locals.

We just paid the fare difference to change our trip to the Big Island (no change fees)

However, Priceline refunded our non-refundable car rental for OGG.......so we weren't really out anything as the hotel was refundable, too.

We go to Lahaina 2x year so we are certainly going to miss it.

qukslvr619

Please understand I am not saying you are wrong and I may be looking at this the wrong way. But from looking through OMAAT, PPro desk agents, and what I witnessed I'm not sure this applies to scenarios like mine and I guess this is where I am confused though because it is very vague.

I understand about complimentary upgrades being limited to one other person, and to that extent even using a SWU for a companion on the same flight but a different PNR. In those scenarios AA indicates about "1" companion; but these scenarios are usually with two people traveling together or instances of dividing a reservation to then put elite member + companion on the upgrade list for comp upgrades. I cannot fathom a scenario of even an EP with say 3 people on the same PNR using miles (out of the EPs account) or 3 SWUs applied, that only the EP and a companion would carry the elite status and the other 1 without status would just fall to the bottom of the list behind everyone including those that are not using instruments.

And why I question that is based off of these two things:
1) When we checked in online we were listed sequentially as 1-5 on the list without any agent intervention. Just checked in, got the notice that we were added to the waitlist and upon viewing the waitlist we were listed together with about 15 people below us. In this case there were 3 seats open so only 3/5 were cleared into the seats by the system. The agent manually went in, downgraded #3 and then placed 3/4/5 on the waitlist separately and then upgraded the person listed as #6. Obviously when the other seat opened up, #7 was upgraded thereafter.
2) AA (nor any of the bloggers have indicated) has no specific/published policy about scenarios with 2+ people on the same PNR using either miles/SWUs. Everything is about a companion when it comes to complimentary upgrades, two people traveling on the same reservation, or SWUs when a companion is on a separate PNR.

If I am wrong based on my analysis, which most likely is the case, then AA needs to pass that information onto the Elite desks, AAdvantage, etc. and at least indicate something on the website. I'm not going to play the upgrade lottery though and if I do ever get a full refund I will be paying for F outright.

qukslvr619

I did notice that the waiver was extended beyond just Maui to include all AA Hawaii airports which probably takes into account people that go to one island then hop over to another. That being said it did indicate no change to origin/destination.

Madison Guy

I have been avoiding the upgrade roulette for a while now, buying J or F using cash or miles, for my trips. Given the changes of how pax are prioritized it just fits my needs to not have to worry about it, as many are now ahead of me. That said, I have always understood the companion status inheritance was always limited to one person only, regardless of instrument used. Of course, I have seen other things actually happen over the years, and have also had both correct and incorrect information given to me by agents.

qukslvr619

And I suppose that’s my issue is that there really is no transparency and multiple explanations exist with agents making their own interpretation. AAdvantage desk says one thing, gate agents say another, and waitlist/system processing the upgrades follows programmed logic but agents can override.

On UA it’s clearly stated on their website with respect to mileage upgrade awards:
If the request includes multiple travelers, then priority is based on the highest Premier status on the reservation.

Had the multiple agents at AA that I spoke with months ago indicated otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent a buttload of money doing the instant status challenge, charging everything to my AA credit card, and trying to reach the higher tier by moving all my business over to AA. Clearly made a mistake with that.