Category Archives for Airlines.
American Airlines sent out a memo to all of its agents reminding them about all of the reasons they should use to deny or limit passenger claims for delayed, lost or damaged luggage, especially after international trips.
It was all probably right, of course, but it’s more important to train agents and baggage handlers on proper care for luggage to minimize damage to the items entrusted to them.
American Airlines cancelled 342 flights on Friday, more than any other airline in the world. That came on the heels of a major day of cancellations on Thursday. The primary cause of this was weather in Dallas – and the skies were clear.
That was followed by even more cancellations on Saturday, as the airline ran out of available crew, with more to come on Sunday with planes and people out of position.
Five years ago a United Airlines pilot announced that everyone had to keep politics off the plane. Passengers cheered. No matter your feelings about silly memes or the President of the United States, there are some places where we should be left alone. Stuck in a metal tube, you can’t escape a pilot’s politics.
Before the pandemic American Airlines served 8 routes from Austin, flying to its hubs. They’ve quadrupled their destinations since then and passengers are using the airport for connections in a major way as well.
In any employee meeting American’s Vice President of Network Planning dropped two other cities they’re thinking about as having similar characteristics to Austin.
Before the pandemic American Airlines was prepared to announce free inflight wifi. They didn’t want to do it, but Delta was testing it and if Delta went forward they were going to match whatever Delta did. (Delta ultimately found that their Gogo systems weren’t robust enough for all the usage free wifi entails.)
American doesn’t offer free wifi, but it’s something they still think about.
It isn’t often that a union tries to get people not to join. Usually the incentive is to grow its ranks. However the American Airlines pilots union is warning pilots if they go to work at American Airlines they’ll be stuck at American for their whole career thanks to the senior system which makes jumping carriers not a viable option (since you lose schedule flexibility and pay).
It’s one thing to say that American Airlines doesn’t want a $15,000 a year flyer, who doesn’t also engage in the program in other ways, to have top status – since those other activities are often more profitable to American.
It’s another, I think, to say that whole classes of members are shut off from much of the new program based on their geography, or that new millennial flyers they supposedly want to attract have a higher hurdle to clear for status than older business travelers who last had to meet standard criteria for status in 2019.
Video of a line for customer service was shared to twitter. It wraps around the customer service area and into the corridor of the terminal – and it just keeps going. Naturally this was American Airlines, and naturally it was in Miami.
Here’s what to do when facing this worst-case scenario.
We can punish bad actors – and we should – but there seems to be a combination of factors that lead American to have to deal with this issue more than others. Yet aside from lobbying for punishments, American’s approach has largely been to lobby for airports not to allow vendors to sell alcohol to go any longer. It’s always struck me as sort of stupid that places do this, but it doesn’t seem to be a factor driving American to experience problems more often than others.
After another flight diversion following a flight attendant assault, I have to wonder why is it that so many passenger incidents – this one seemingly worse than most – seem to occur on American Airlines? They’re much larger than Spirit, to be sure, carrying far more passengers. But why do they have more inflight crazy than Delta, United and Southwest? I don’t know. There are several hypotheses I’ve entertained that don’t quite fit perfectly.
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 »
