American Airlines has been leaning more into self-service tools for customers especially to delay with delays and flight cancellations. That’s both better for the customer, because it gives them tools to deal with problems quickly and makes them feel more in control, and better for the airline because it reduces customer service expense. This is still a work in progress.
The nice thing about a renewed focus on the customer experience, and starting out behind some of your peers, is that there’s already a real roadmap. You know what other airlines have done that moves the needle with customers. So just like holding planes for tight connections like United has done for several years, they’re taking a page out of United’s playbook and are now working to clearly communicate the reason for flight disruptions using natural language.
This will roll out over the rest of March to the American Airlines mobile app and website. There will also be “push notifications, emails and text messages.”
“Enhancing the digital experience is a priority for the team at American,” said American’s Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden. “By pairing self-service tools with explanations, we give customers greater transparency and more control throughout their journey
United’s natural language explanations are a bit more extensive than what’s shown in these screen shots, such as “We want you to know your flight is departing late because we needed to finish cleaning your plane.”
“…our connecting flight to Bangor was canceled due to a lack of FAA staff.”
“…we care about our customers and are just waiting on a few more people before we can take off…”
I do think that American is getting ahead of themselves on the cost-cutting side before the technology improvements are really at a place where they can supplant in-person assistance. Nonetheless, American seems headed in the right direction overall.
This “plain English” will be via an LLM. Probably one with Genuine People Personalities(tm).
UA rolled this out a few years ago. I don’t know that DL has that in their app, which actually looks and feels ancient compared to AA’s which itself is fairly basic.
Thanks, Gary, nice article ! That said, a warning to the other users out there, the AA App has still got lots of bugs. Several weeks back I was traveling on a tight connection through Dallas (made worse by the aircraft stopping short of an occupied gate by 15 minutes). After deplaning, I ran to a DFW Skylink stop, where I waited 7-8 minutes before some maintenance guy ambled up and said it was down (nice of the App to NOT say that). Still, the App was saying that my connection was on time, and not wanting to get crushed by AA’s AURA, I ran a full terminal to the gate. Once there, I found out that the flight was delayed, and I could have walked. The gate agent had the nerve to say it wasn’t AA’s fault, as they outsourced their APP coding. Grrr… Just this past week, I rescheduled a flight, and the AA App wouldn’t update, even after rebooting my iPhone. It took removing the App and then reloading it fresh to fix that. I’m not holding my breath for accurate updates through this App.
Aww, man… plain-English? I was hoping for frontier-English, maybe with a west-Texas bent: “Howdy, y’all… yer aero-plane done ‘screw’d tha pooch,’ cowboy… gon’ be at least 45 minutes late, partner!”
The issue is that most people do not understand reasons for delays or somehow think the airline can control all delays. I had a weather delay a couple weeks ago going from TUL to DFW and of course I hear “I’m never flying American again.” At the same time as there are announcements that a Delta flight would have a crew flown in but the flight would be six hours late.
That being said it’s helpful at least for people with common sense.
This assumes you can trust AA to provide the real reason. Their track record indicates they can’t be trusted, especially if the real reason would cause them to incur some form of passenger compensation
The headline should read, “American Airlines will now lie to you about the reason your flight is delayed…in plain English.”
Can’t wait for the crew to give one reason (e.g., lack of crew, mechanical, etc.) and the app to pop-up with “weather.” That’ll replicate the current experience!
Note: AA has not announced plans to give you the delay reason in advance. Instead, inevitably, these delay reasons will come in 5 minute increments only after the original and re-posted departure times have passed.