When Oscar Munoz took over from disgraced United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek the airline rolled out modest customer experience improvements as part of an overall attempt to change the narrative of the airline: Illy coffee and stroopwafels as complimentary snacks in coach.
Supposedly American is unable to program waivers based on flight number or regional carrier. They could have issued a waiver for Charlotte but that would have meant that some customers unaffected by American’s major outage could have benefited with fee waivers.
They chose to inconvenience well over 100,000 customers on cancelled flights, not counting myriad more on massively delayed flights, instead of allowing fee-free changes for passengers flying through the most affected airport — chancing that someone somewhere not flying PSA might benefit from the waiver a cost American money. Shameful.
Even though the carrier says they’re trying to simplify their fleet, operate fewer aircraft types and subfleets, they’re doubling down on flying similar competitor products.
Their regional partners, including wholly owned carriers like Envoy Air and PSA, fly CR7s, Embraer 140s and 145s, and even CRJ-200s. Regional jets with 50 seats and below don’t offer a first class cabin. While most of American’s regional fleet offers internet, most lacks seat power.
Back in March American Airlines Chairman Doug Parker described the Boeing 767 as a bad customer experience and suggested they needed to retire the aircraft sooner. Indeed shortly after that the airline announced a big order of Boeing 787s.
According to American’s Vice President for Planning, “As the 767 is retired, as it’s going through the process of retiring it, we will bring it increasingly into the East Coast to go die and fly fewer trips into other hubs.”
It’s usually risky to fly one itinerary on separate tickets. That’s because when you’re on one ticket, if you face a flight delay or cancellation the airline responsible for the irregularity has to get you to your final destination. But if you’re on separate tickets they usually don’t — they just have to get you as far as the end of the ticket you’re flying them on.
But it’s not always a risk if you know about this American Airlines policy.
A man onboard a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Shiraz, Iran wouldn’t sit down despite requests from flight attendants — because he was too busy begging.
Passengers even gave the man money as crew told him he was delaying their departure.
When American Airlines and US Airways merged four and a half years ago many legacy American Airlines executives departed. Several management level staff that were holdovers from American before the merger left two years ago, presumably eligible for bonuses based on the length of time they had stayed on.
In any merger of this size there are initial promises of cost savings, and personnel is one area where those need to be delivered.
Keeping track of aircraft is hard. Three years ago American Airlines flew the wrong plane to Hawaii. The aircraft they flew wasn’t certified for extended overwater operations. There wasn’t actually anything unsafe about the decision, but it didn’t match the minimum equipment required. The airline simply dispatched the wrong aircraft by mistake.
Now comes word that American kept leased aircraft beyond the expiration date of their agreement according to a lawsuit filed by Wells Fargo in the Southern District of New York.
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American Airlines President Robert Isom held an employee town hall on Friday in Los Angeles.
A premium services employee asked about whether they’ll get lie flat seats on cross country flights, something her ConciergeKey customers are asking for, “they really are requesting the transcon like the New York flights.. this is just something we see all time.”
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
