justforfun

Great opportunity to earn their Airline Survival badge.

Dave Noble

I would like to know - I am organising the travel for Australian Scouts to go to the New Zealand Jamboree and cannot think what workaround there is to handle if the carrier is unable to handle the passengers which it knows are coming

I would have hoped that the article writers could have got into close of the current century and not called them "Boy Scouts" - there are lots of girls in Scouts - even the USA finally started admitting girls

I think that the number is quite easy to believe given that there are over 40,000 Scouts at the WSJ

njf1003

I think it is likely that AA "forgot" that these were all group bookings which typically require special help to check in with a person so they couldn't go to the kiosk to check in and had to see a person and they didn't call in enough extra staff to help out initially. And given most of them were 14-17, they didn't have to have an ID to fly which further complicates things. And as you said CLT isn't used to so many people originating there as there are typically lots of connections so the baggage system couldn't handle it especially with every one checking a bag.

Dave Noble

Given the size of the group booking and the interactions AA will have had with the organisers, I think it unlikely that it forgot that they were coming - poorly prepared possibly, but not forgotten

thedeeg

Gshumway

Maybe they should have palatalized the duffel bags and shipped them as cargo.

Dave Noble

Not like the scouts would want their luggage at their destination

Checking in 1 bag per person should not be too difficult a task to get performed at an airport

Lux Flyer

CLT handled 46.4 million passengers in 2018 (per wikipedia). This averages out to around 127k passengers/day (admittedly not all of these are originating); but 8k at any one time shouldn't be terribly unexpected (arriving over the span of 5-6 hours it sounds like). However a large number of these were group bookings, requiring special assistance to check in, which takes quite a bit longer. The most I've seen is 3-4 agents available to handle groups at any one time, so when you have somewhere around 200-400 groups arriving, while only being ready to handle 3-4 groups at a time, the airline is going to struggle to keep up.

Dave Noble

The airline knew that there was going to be thousands of Scouts arriving and even had plans in relaiton to where to keep them ( on buses ) - not having enough check in agents avaulable that day to process them is a failing of the airline - if this is the case, then it should have rostered more staff on for the day

IADCAflyer

American seems to have an innate ability to turn everything it touches into crap these days. I'm sure this will start to make its way into the media. Kind of like the group that was trying to get to DC a couple of months ago and DL agents stepped in and had a spare jet flown to OKC to take the group to DC when AA simply told the group, "too bad, so sad".

Lack of creativity, lack of planning, lack of flex.

Athena53

Thanks for this- I'd been trying to figure out why it was so chaotic when there were probably no more passengers going out on that day than any other day (planes are generally full these days and I doubt there were more planes than usual taking off). Busing them in at insane hours of the AM way before their flights was a blunder on the side of the Jamboree planners, IMO, but that couldn't have helped- they probably had only a skeleton staff at CLT in the wee hours of the morning.

I didn't realize that processing them as a group traveling together meant they all had to check in at the desk. What a mess.

GrayAnderson

To start off with, I'm not sure who would really consider Mt. Hope to be "nearby" to Charlotte. It's over a three-hour drive.

So, I'm not quite sure who deserves the blame for the BSA FUBAR:
-It sounds like the BSA were trying to save money on buses, but there may have been a practical issue here (sheer bus availability becomes a thing at some point), particularly at peak times. Ditto logistics with loading areas at the Jamboree location. The lengthy at-airport waits seem to be a problem, however.
-The BSA probably also deserves a bad note for running everything out of CLT. CVG, RIC, and a few other airports aren't substantially further (and a few are closer). If staffing was an issue, it might have behooved American to proactively cooperate to book some blocks of fares out of other airports in the region (ROA leaps to mind, as does TRI). I suppose this was a coordination thing, but it feels to me as though taking some effort to distribute the boarding load should have occurred to someone in that chain.
-As to the staffing situation at CLT...I'm guessing that AA saw a higher-than-normal pax count but didn't take into account the mountains of checked luggage going out (or an unusually high number of kids flying, for that matter). Presuming that positioning a bunch of staff at CLT for the day would've been problematic, though, I have to wonder (if there was any advance knowledge at hand) why the airport wasn't involved here. I'm thinking of the flexible status of many agents at, for example, YUL (as an outstation for several carriers). Again, distributing the departure load to a few airports would have gone a long way here.
-As to marshalling the waiting scouts? Who knows who is to blame for that. Could be AA. Could be CLT. Could be the BSA. Could be a mix of all three and a "disaster cascade" (e.g. CLT orders the buses to be moved and fouls everyone else's plans and hell breaks loose).

So a lot of the blame does land on AA and some on the BSA, but in some respects if everyone was trying to keep the operation "simple" in terms of logistics (one departure point, one arrival point) it was probably going to be a fragile situation no matter how much planning went into it unless AA was ready to completely rework their operations for the day at CLT. BTW, presuming it was 10k scouts traveling out of Charlotte, that's over a 10% bump in "average day" traffic (and in terms of initial boardings, given CLT's hub nature, I'm guessing the impact was easily 2-3x that percentage-wise, possibly even more, all of whom probably had more verification going on than normal as well as bag-checking).

Honestly, given the numbers involved and the like it seems like it is entirely possible that this was a situation that was simply unfixable in terms of counter space and so on. There's such a thing as only being able to push so much water through the straw.

Over on the DFW flight: My immediate thought was "If DFW couldn't take them, would SAT have been capable?" Of course, I suspect that (as AUS does have CBP facilities) if the crew had died they probably would either have been disembarked or been facing some ugly consequences if the delays went past a certain point (since sooner or later, health issues and the like are going to start coming into play).

hotturnip

1) Why do "group bookings" have to be handled differently, and take so long?
2) If AA accepted all these "group bookings," then they should have been prepared to handle them.

wrp96

wrp96