AA's 2024 Ops
 

Didn't see a recent thread dedicated to discussion on AA's ops so I thought I'd start one here. The US DOT report for June (which only covers stats through April) is out today (available at this link: https://www.transportation.gov/resou...onsumer-report) and it shows:

For April
- AA was #8 (out of 10) for On Time Arrivals, ahead of only JetBlue and Frontier. YTD figures through April have AA at #6.
- AA was #6 for cancellations
- AA continues to be last (#10) when it comes to mishandled baggage
- IDB numbers are only available for Q1 and percentage wise, AA is #9 (ahead of only Frontier). AA IDBed 3,061 passengers during Q1. During the same time period, DL had 0 and UA had 75.

AA had significant challenges in May due to weather, so it'll be interesting to see how the May numbers look compared to other airlines.

But it seems that for all of AA's focus on D0, which has led to passenger unfriendly moves like having the algorithm remove you from a flight when it thinks you are going to miss a connection, and no longer allowing GAs to add passengers to standby lists... they really haven't gotten their ops together.

And yet, most of us keep flying them.

Nothing will change until they are impacted hard enough financially. That's the ONLY language a major corporation understands.

When did this "enhancement" occur?

March 1, 2024

It'll be interesting to see what Q2's financials look like when they come out, but of course the big impacts will be from things other than ops (shortage of aircraft; debt; corporate customers booking away, etc.). Perhaps your ops have to be a huge dumpster fire like B6 before people start booking away.

I, unfortunately, own AA stock, and I can assure you, the financial impact continues. :rolleyes: I do hope some of this will turn with a new contract. It's been a rough ride. I have not had terrible experiences personally (and have even been offered PDBs), but AA has always been the one people love to hate and this certainly doesn't help when there is good reason why.

again i'd like to provide context for these idb numbers. AA flies 50-60 million people per quarter. So the chance of idb is vanishingly low. There is no meaningful difference between first and last on that list. It happens so rarely, you are about as likely to die being attacked by killer bees in the usa than you are likely to be idb'ed.

I don’t think most of us on here (who are likely to have elite status and thus higher up in the pecking order) are concerned about being IDBed. Like the mishandled bags, it’s more about how it’s yet another aspect of the company that is being poorly run.

Either something is wrong with AA’s overbooking algorithm, or they are just being too cheap compared to DL and UA when it comes to offering VDB compensation .

if it's such a rare event that no one needs to worry about it, then it isnt evidence of the airline being poorly run.

you might as well argue that only ryan air and virgin atlantic are the only safe airlines because they have never had a passenger fatality, when the reality is that most major airlines are perfectly safe.

DL has nearly the same fleet size and carries close to AA's passenger volume. The difference between 3000 and 0 is statistically significant.

More importantly, no one is looking at this single stat in a vacuum. This stat, along with pretty much every other one (financial or operational), show that AA is poorly run.

Wait, what? Can Admirals Clubs agents still do this? This would be quite some incentive to get people to pay up for lounge access huh...

Quite the airport experience to be stuck around not able to get help from a human being, but only via an app so useless that you inevitably end up having to call and wait on hold for 2h or deal with chat agents that unfortunately have declined in quality since this feature first rolled out.

AC agents cannot do it. Neither can phone agents. App or nothing now, unless you get very lucky.

Yikes.

This algorithm change just bit me hard last night. My connection was delayed, but I made it to my gate, and they were still boarding; but I was told I no longer had a seat, and had been re-booked for the next morning.

I suspect this will happen more and more, due to AA's lack of ontime performance and them forcing short connections.
Just booked a flight last week that offered a 25 min connection in CLT. No way... If flight A lands on time, that means flight B is boarding as I walk off of flight A. It's almost like they want to make us misconnect..