Last month I had a flight cancelled due to weather. The alternative offered by AS would have me arriving 10 hours later and at midnight instead of 2.00pm. There was availability on AA that would have got me to my destination at 2.30pm, just 30 minutes late, but AS refused to put me on AA. I told them I did not accept their alternative and asked to cancel my itinerary and receive a refund since there was a SouthWest flight leaving in 45 minutes that woudl get me to my destination only 3 hours late. AS told me that since I had bought a saver fare they would only protect me on another AS metal flight and if I chose not to fly I was not entitled to a refund. I cited DOT rules and they said that AS policy supersedes federal law. I cited their own CoC and they said their CoC doesn't apply to Saver fares. I asked to speak to someone else and the person told me that she was the supervsior and was the most senior person onsite. I tried to phone AS but wait times were over an hour. The app instructed me to call customer care.

About 5 days later I did get a refund to my credit card but a voucher that I'd used did not get refunded.

I took the SouthWest flight at considerable expense and sent a complaint to AS via their web form on 5/11/26. They bounced back a response that said due to high volumes they would reply within 7-10 days. By 5/23 I had not heard anything so I replied to the email and asked for an update. By 6/2 I had still heard nothing so I escalated to Trudy Dobbins. Still not heard anything.

Meanwhile I have filed a complaint with the DOT.

Is this their usual level of customer service?

Sadly yes. Will take a long time and likely many follow up�s to get resolved. Call them instead of writing to check on it.

Unfortunately response times to virtually any Customer Care inquiries are running well over a month and sometimes two. Even just a year ago it was closer to 1-2 weeks so yes it's gotten worse.

What a clever way to send the message that you don�t actually care about your customers.

Have they reduced staffing so much that they can�t respond to messages in a timely fashion?

Or has the volume of customer care requests increased so much that current staffing levels are insufficient?

Have you ever sent a customer care message to AA? AC?
They're all the same.
Post travel resolution is rarely time sensitive, it's not exactly an area that businesses want to allocate resources to when there's no calculable ROI.
If you were running AS and had some funds to allocate, would you increase the budget to a cost centre like post travel support, or would you invest it in something that will improve guest experience like new lounges, Starlink installations, etc?

There's also a chance that sending follow up emails/responses puts your ticket to the back of the queue again. I've seen that happen before with Zendesk and other support platforms.
As you can imagine, there's no one looking at the inquiry until it's assigned to an agent when it reaches the front of the queue. Sending follow up emails won't change that.

Agree with this. When I had to deal with the aftermath of a last-minute flight cancellation last year, I ended up calling in after my email went ignored for weeks. The agent was able to locate the documentation I sent in and resolve everything with me over the phone. Just make sure to call during Customer Care hours, and if you get routed to a Reservations agent, asked to be transferred.

Why is that an either/or question?

Airlines created loyalty programs to get more of the travel dollars by giving travelers a reason to buy more often from them. Poor/non-responsive customer service seems to be the opposite: people already had a bad customer experience, and now you are giving them a bad experience a second time. Which then leads to DOT complaints or some people going other routes for relief (small claims court?) that aren�t exactly good for the airline.

If you run a customer service department, you need to have staffing that is able to deal with the routine inflow of messages. E.g., if you have 100 incoming requests per day and a service rep can deal with 20 per day, you need five reps to not build up an ever increasing backlog. And obviously you need staffing to deal with sick days, vacations, and occasional �incidents� that lead to higher volumes of incoming requests (system meltdowns, anyone?).

To me a months long backlog seems to be an indication that they don�t have the necessary staffing to handle requests in a timely fashion (I�d love to know what their target response time is). Which may be the result of problems that need fixing elsewhere (to reduce the inflow). E.g., I had to send a request earlier this year when the 10k perk (double miles with partners) didn�t work. How many other requests did they get just from this one IT bug?

Throwing more agents at the problem is only treating the symptoms. The real issues are poor IT and poor training. AS needs to get serious about making their IT work efficiently, predictably, and reliably. Agents all need to be on the same page with one call/message resolution eliminating the dismissive MSU responses to "improve" stats. If you take care of those, the backlog will take care of itself.

Personally, if I have sent a message and have not received a reply within 14 days, I call. Agents can pull emails out of the queue.

James

I recently sent an email to AA and got an AI generated response within an hour. Replied and asked for a more substantive response and got a reply from a human the next day.

I give it three weeks.

I would say a month.

I had a case I explained some here in the past, where I had a Rocketmiles stay checkout on Dec 29, but they credited me on "January 3" even though points are always supposed to be credited the date of the activity.
The problem with that being the miles would've put me over the 85K milestone in 2025(I wanted the 2-10K status boost for '26)

I started a ticket on Jan 7.
Token email communication here there type of stuff.
Finally received this on...................

Agreed
For a measley 2000 redeemable points I am not super motivated to spend time with a CSR on the phone.

And for AS it's not a good use of resources as well - I would be shocked if the cost per request handled by a phone agent wasn't substantially higher than if it was handled asynchronously by email.

Agreed, the AA AI response is always fast. But normally, doesn't add anything to the discussion. I've definitely had AA take over a month to review my subsequent reply. As recently as last summer.
But from my point of view when submitting a claim... makes no difference to me whether I get resolution tomorrow or in 6 weeks. The event has already occurred. I'm not going to fly AA/AS less because they take a longer to respond for post-travel support. I suspect that's what they're banking on how others will react as well and why they underinvest on resources in that area.

Let’s say you write to them because some flights or other partner activity didn’t post correctly and you are missing the status points that would put you at a higher level of elite status. Are you really okay with getting a resolution in six weeks, maybe after you could have gotten some upgrades on subsequent trips, gotten lounge access and earned some extra bonus miles?

(I agree that there are other customer service requests where timely resolution is not mission critical - my 2k redeemable miles for the 10k perk for example… but all these requests seem to go into the same queue)