American Airlines Canceled My Flight, Then Its Computers Failed — The Backup Plan That Got Me Home (And Pocketing Miles)

The best time to fix a travel meltdown is before the airline officially admits you’re in one. I was caught in a weather mess compounded by an airline computer failure. Here’s how I played the odds at each stage of the trip.

I had to spend one night in New York this week. I took an American Airlines non-stop up, and it was frustrating that the wifi wasn’t working. I tweeted out that frustration, and I got an apology e-mail with 2,500 miles. I was delayed on the return, with most of the delay due to weather, and I got an apology email with 7,500 miles.

I haven’t seen that sort of proactive compensation, when there’s no complaint, at least in my own travels. And I’m seeing American offer a lot more compensation for volunteers to take bumps in oversold situations. They’re apologizing where warranted, making the apologies tangible, and doing it over things that matter.

American has historically been at the bottom of the industry for involuntary bumping of passengers, in part because they haven’t been as willing to compensate passengers to get them to volunteer – and at a fundamental level, passengers need to have confidence that the airline they’re choosing is going to have a seat for them.

I don’t usually write about my domestic flights, but these were notable because of how things went wrong, mostly on the way home and mostly due to weather, and my thinking process along the way – for choosing the best alternate trips, for booking hotels – and I thought I’d share those because they may be useful as you work through your own strategies for these types of situations.

BLADE From New York JFK to Manhattan

On the way into the city I booked a free helicopter transfer using my annual Platinum benefit from Bilt Rewards. Often Blade won’t actually save you that much time, because you have to transfer from the arrival terminal to Blade’s terminal, and wait for your helicopter. That might be 20 minutes or more! And then you’re going to need to get from their heliport in Manhattan to wherever you’re going in the city.

So depending on traffic, and your actual destination, it might be a bit of a wash. In this case, it wound up a time saver (and I was getting a free transfer into the city versus paying for a cab or Uber).

My American Airlines flight had departed on time, but with air traffic control in New York we wound up arriving about 20 minutes late. I’d booked the Blade helicopter for 40 minutes post-scheduled arrival. That meant I had 20 minutes to get from one of the farthest gates at JFK’s terminal 8 out to the front of the terminal. Blade texts you, you let them know your ETA and they dispatch a car.

I made it out to their car about 10 minutes to flight departure. That’s when they ostensibly are already starting to board, but not really. I arrived 5 minutes to departure, and they were just refueling the helicopter. I had a couple of minutes to sit in their terminal before taking the flight along with two other people. It was five minutes tops into the city.

Thompson Gild Hall

I was spending the night at Thompson Gild Hall. I would have preferred the other Thompson but they were full. The upside of this one is that I get up super early, and they’re just steps away from a 5 a.m.-opening Starbucks. Their own lobby coffee doesn’t become available until 6 a.m.

At check-in I was first told breakfast doesn’t start until 8 a.m. so I’d miss that Globalist perk since I needed to be at a meeting at 8. I mentioned this and was told that breakfast actually begins at 7:30 a.m. Still no help, and honestly rather absurd in my view not to offer breakfast earlier on a weekday in Manhattan.

I was upgraded to a corner room, which was still quite small. Fortunately it was just me spending the night, and it was only one night. It’s not a room I would have wanted to spend a lot of time on or share. But it was comfortable, clean and more than fine for its purpose. This wasn’t like staying at the Peninsula or The Chatwal.

The Cooked To Order Food In The Greenwich Lounge Was Actually Good

On the way out of New York the next day I returned to JFK to fly American non-stop back to Austin.

My Royal Jordanian status match continues to pay dividends. I’m able to use American’s business class Flagship lounges on domestic flights. I just show my account in the Royal Jordanian app, they enter the number to validate the status (while still crediting the flight to AAdvantage).

At New York JFK there’s no longer a Flagship lounge – the lounges are jointly run with British Airways – and the old business class lounge is called the Greenwich lounge. Inside it was Flagship First Dining and that’s a beer tasting room and bar with cooked-to-order food, that many passengers don’t realize is there.

When you enter the lounge there’s overflow space to the right, and the lounge entrance to the left. That overflow space is the old Admirals Club (there’s now only an Admiral’s Club on the satellite concourse). American knocked down the wall and connected the spaces through the back of the tasting room that used to be Flagship First Dining.

American’s Flagship lounges now have QR-code ordering of prepared to order items. Here, though, there are no QR codes. Instead you need to find the one employee in the tasting room who’s responsible for the bar, and they’re only sometimes around.

Then when food comes out, she calls out names for you to come collect your food rather than delivering orders to tables since she doesn’t know where to deliver the dishes. Still, I thought everything was surprising good!

My Flight Cancels So I Played The Odds (And Lost)

Things were looking good for my flight. There was bad weather coming in. JetBlue had already dumped about 40% of its New York schedule. American had a lot of flights cancel, but wasn’t as aggressive. Plenty of other flights were taken off the board but mine was still going.

Still, one of the best benefits of Executive Platinum status is the airline’s willingness to add flights to a reservation as a backup. Most passengers would be able to change flights in this circumstance (a weather waiver was in effect). But they allow adding flights to a booking – you don’t have to give up the one you have, you can still try to make it, but you secure space on another flight in case you need it (before that space is taken by someone else).

I had booked the 7 a.m. departure the next morning as a backup to my 7 p.m. flight. It was the next non-stop. By the time my original flight cancelled around 5 p.m., there wasn’t any space left – so I was in good shape.

Still, I wanted to make it home earlier if I could. Plus, I didn’t know what weather would be like the next morning. And plenty of planes and crew would be out of position so I could easily see my morning flight delayed or cancelled.

I got added to the standby list for the delayed 5:25 p.m. which was oversold. And I got confirmed on the late 10:50 p.m. Dallas – Austin. I cleared onto the New York – Dallas flight as the last one on (emergency exit middle seat). Things looked great!

However, as we were ready to push back, American’s computers went down. We had to wait for them to be brought back up – the whole airline was on a ground stop – and that meant missing our window to take off. By the time we were able to go, the airport had shut down for weather. We had a long tarmac delay, emergency snacks and water was distributed, and then when we were finally ready to go we had to… return to the gate to replenish the water. And, because they didn’t want to risk running afoul of the three hour tarmac delay rule, we had to wait at the gate to give passengers a chance to get off, too.

In most cases, I was advising passengers to stick it out. For instance,

• A man was trying to get to Australia. He thought it might be a good idea just to try again the next day, but didn’t know what to do. He kept asking a flight attendant to tell him what to do – and she wouldn’t. She had thoughts but didn’t want to be responsible, and make the airline responsible, when invariably things still went awry. So I offered my best advice: he’d already waited out the delay, just get to Dallas. Even if he couldn’t get on an Australia flight from there, he could get out to the West Coast early the next day. He might not be able to get a flight out of New York the next day to make an Australia connection if he got off the aircraft.

• Another man was trying to get to Charlotte. Since his original flight was cancelled, he got on the only flight out he could – New York to Dallas to connect to Charlotte. He was going to miss the Charlotte flight so thought he should maybe stay? I told him he’d have a lot better shot getting to Charlotte the next day from Dallas (where there were seats) than from New York (since American’s Charlotte flights all showed zero inventoy out of New York airports).

We finally pushed back, taxied out, and got in line. It had been about four hours since we first boarded and still had the full flight ahead of us. This would actually be my longest flight in a coach seat since 1991 (!). Fortunately the man at the window seat beside me had decided to get off the plane, so I got to move over. He’d been in a foul mood anyway, because the captain made him prove that his locked carry-on bag didn’t contain any lithium ion batteries. He was hitting things and mouthing off at a flight attendant so I never did ask the backstory there.

The flight itself was fine. The crew was great, though admittedly tired. During drink service I got the buy on board turkey sandwich, which really isn’t bad. Comping it for an Executive Platinum member, the flight attendant even thanked me for my business (something that also happened getting off my connecting flight on arrival in Austin the next day!). A bit of a bumpy ride in spots due to the weather, but otherwise aces all around.

I Wound Up At The Hyatt Regency DFW At 2 AM

Knowing that the weather was bleak, I followed the Tiffany Funk rule to treat major delay events like the zombie apocalypse and keep moving. I figured it was better to get out of New York, no matter what. I’d be better off getting home from Dallas than trying to do it the next day from the center of the chaos. With my family I’d have made a different decision. I would have gone into the city, we could have had dinner and been comfortable, even if it meant an early start. But there the tradeoffs are different and my only goal was reaching my destination as quickly as possible.

Once in the air I needed to,

• Confirm the space I’d also held for a morning Dallas – Austin flight, cancelling out the flight I was no longer going to make that night and getting the ticket reissued. I direct messaged American on Twitter to get them to do this. I also needed my morning New York JFK – Austin flight removed.

• Get a hotel room for the night in Dallas. I did this online. As a safety precaution because I’d be arriving so late I also direct messaged Hyatt asking them to let the hotel know I’d be turning up in the middle of the night and not to cancel out my room (less of a risk with an airport hotel). More than a dozen hours later they never replied – their customer service isn’t nearly what it used to be.

Earlier in the evening the Grand Hyatt seemed to have plenty of rooms, but I waited to book – initially I didn’t know whether I’d make a connection to the 10:50 p.m. Austin flight, whether I’d get stuck in Dallas, or whether the flight wouldn’t go and I’d need a New York City hotel night. There was almost nothing available near JFK, at least in the set of properties that’s reasonably clean (TWA Hotel was pricing over $700, Comfort Inn was $400).

I booked the Hyatt Regency DFW, which isn’t as nice, but it turns out we’d be landing at terminal C and even departing the next morning out of C. Even though the Grand Hyatt is physically part of the airport, it’s in terminal D. The Hyatt Regency is more convenient if you know not to wait for their shuttle that runs every 20 minutes. Just walk out and through the C parking garage and it takes just a few minutes each way, no Skylink required.

I Did Get To Try American’s Refurbished A319 For The First Time

My morning flight was on an Airbus A319. I had a middle seat in Main Cabin Extra (extra legroom). While I was in the old C Admiral’s Club, I got a notice on my app that I’d been upgraded. This was the auto-upgrade run by AgentAssist prior to boarding, and it took me by surprise since first class had been sold out.

There were seats available up front on on the 36 minute flight because the tail assigned turns out to have been one of the newly refurbished planes with an extra row of first class. I’d seen the photos but never been onboard myself. Basically think of the new cabin as being aesthetically like the Boeing 787-9P, Airbus A321XLR and the new regional jet interiors – blues, nicely stitched seats, a bit of brown.

The extra row of first is nicer. The look and feel of the cabin is nicer. But the rest of the plane is squeezed, because they don’t give up coach seats to add those four first class seats.

Still, I really like the attention to detail in the design – it’s something we hadn’t seen from American Airlines in a long time. The new clubs are nice. The new cabins are nice.

The only miss is that they’re retrofitting planes and still not putting in seatback entertainment systems. In fact, for these Airbus A319s they’re taking out the seatback screens from the (pre-merger American Airlines planes) that still had them.

That actually surprised the first class flight attendant who started the safety briefing, and then realized it was just audio and that they all had to assemble for the demonstration. She ran back to stop the audio and get it set up again.

I only got about three and a half hours of sleep, but I was running on morning espresso and complimentary restaurant breakfast from the Hyatt, feeling pretty good, and I was home earlier than if I’d stayed the night in New York.