American Airlines Says It Has Too Many Broken Seats, Bad Screens, And Duct Tape — A Fix Is Coming This Summer

American has made a ton of customer improvements over the past 15 years. They’ve been ticking off a gains like better champagne and coffee, delivering new seat products that have been in the works for years, and investing in new and refurbished club lounges. They have slightly improved coach buy on board food, but there’s a long way to go (they are not yet close to Alaska or United on this).

Not everything they’ve done has been positive. They closed airport customer service counters offering live help for passengers that are delayed or cancelled. They didn’t think through service flow on their new Airbus A321XLRs very well. I was just told at the Charlotte ‘Provisions’ that Admirals Club members can now only have one single food item.

Overall, though, it’s been impressive progress – though I’ve worried that the improvements get drowned out in the noise without an overarching vision and without selling employees on how they’re giving employees the tools to deliver a better product, that will improve customer experience, and translate into both pride in their work and more pay (flight attendants now have the same profit-sharing formula that Delta provides – they just need the profit!).

At American’s quarterly internal ‘State of the Airline’ employee meeting held right after their earnings call on Thursday (a recording of which was reviewed by View From The Wing), Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden shared updates on how the investments they’ve made so far are being received – and some of what’s coming next – framing that they “have delivered more enhancements for our customers in the last nine or 10 months than we have in the last six or seven years combined.” That’s actually fair.

Net Promoter Score Is Up

Customer reaction to the American experience and brand matters. Garboden has said they believe that one point of net promoter score improvement yields $50 million to $100 million in revenue.

She reported that net promoter score “started the year a little rough in the first quarter.” Their operation melted down in January, leading to cancellation of nearly 10,000 flights. Scores improved in March and April.

They seperate out the analysis between scores where flights are on-time and where they’re delayed.

• On-time operations is a baseline. Delayed passengers will be unhappy passeners.
  
• American used to believe that was the end of the analysis.
  
• But on-time isn’t enough to drive a revenue premium and as a high cost airline they must do this to be profitable.

When American is on-time, net promoter scores are improving:

For on-time NPS, we are seeing numbers we have not seen before. Over the last 14 months, 13 have shown year-over-year improvement in on-time NPS. I think that is representative of all the investments and all the teams focused on our customers.

When flights are delayed that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything they can do about customer experience. And that’s all of the announcements we’ve been seeing mostly around self-service tools for customers to get rebooked, and to get meal vouchers and hotel vouchers.

We do have a lot of opportunity when things do not go as planned. We are working with frontline team members and our technology teams to deliver enhancements when IROPS events happen, and we will continue talking about those throughout the year.

They’re Starting To Evangelize With Employees

While I continue to believe that the CEO Robert Isom needs to be the one making the pitch that things really are different at the airline now for this to have credibility – much of the problem in customer experience comes even from middle managers, who have learned over the years that sweating the small details and formulating policies from the perspective of customers didn’t gain advancement – but we’re seeing some headquarters employees out and about. Garboden notes,

My team and I fly all the time. We are out there talking to team members all the time about how we can better support our customers. We are in purser classes and captain-upgrade classes every week. We also have someone visiting the hubs every week.

Much of the work needs to be done with the front line. It also needs to be done at Skyview headquarters. Wine selection needs to be more than handing a budget to the distributor and checking a box. The small details and getting the most out of every dollar is what middle managers need to be judged on, and that’s a huge shift.

More New Lounge Announcements Are Coming

American Airlines is planning new lounges (including new business class Flagship lounges) in Charlotte and Miami. Charlotte gets its first business class lounge, while Miami gets a new one, allowing the D30 Admirals Club to expand into the old space.

Washington National E Concourse Club

They’re refreshing the Chicago O’Hare Concourse L lounge and the Washington National airport D concourse lounge, and building a new lounge in Austin and in Nashville to replace the current ones there. Plus, the new terminal F at Dallas – Fort Worth will have a lounge complex.

Rendering of New Austin Club

That’s a much more robust pipeline of lounges than we’ve seen from American in a very long time, and American’s lounges that have been debuted over the past five years have been significantly nicer than the ‘modern hospital’ aesthetic they were using since 2017.

American Airlines Philadephia A West Admirals Club

Garboden added,

There are a couple of areas where I get a lot of feedback. The first is lounges: what are we doing there? We have announced more than 12 new and/or renovated lounges in the last nine or 10 months. This is more than we have ever done for our lounge network in the history of American Airlines. It is really exciting.

This will continue throughout the rest of the year, though many of these will come online in 2027 and 2028. We are working to deliver enhancements this year, but look for most of them in 2027 and 2028.

So (1) expect more lounge announcements this year, and (2) expect new improvements in the lounges as well – but don’t expect to experience either yet – there’s a long lead time for lounge projects.

Cabin Interiors Will Start To Be Better Maintained

American Airlines seems to have more issues with broken seats than other airlines. United and Delta cabins are sometimes in disrepair, but American planes seem to fly with seats taken out of service more than other carriers. And I’ve seen this happen on the first flight of the day, and I’ve seen flights operate for days and weeks without having this addressed.

When I’ve asked the airline about it in the past I’ve been challenged: should we delay everyone on the flight to fix this? And my answer is that they should be doing proactive cabin maintenance. They should be doing overnight line maintenance. That the condition of the cabin matters:

• When passengers are sitting in duct taped seats, with broken armrests or out of service tray tables, they are not getting the product that they paid for.
  
• When seats are taken out of service that’s fewer passengers that can fly, it’s fewer upgrades that can clear, and that breeds resentment from loyal flyers whose upgrades don’t clear.
  
• And looking at that in the cabin simply is not premium. It devalues the whole experience.

I’ve been on this soap box for years. And I’m thrilled to hear that American Airlines finally gets it and plans to do something about it. Garboden explains,

I see this myself when I fly, is that we have too many broken seats. We have too many IFE systems that do not work. We have duct tape where we should not have duct tape.

I am excited that we have created a team within Tech Ops whose sole focus will be making sure our aircraft interiors look the way they should for our customers. We are just starting to build that up, and by the end of the summer I expect we will see significant improvements in our aircraft interiors.

Garboden also talked about “having a really good team member experience” as crucial to having “a good customer experience.” That was part of the next presentation.