American Airlines standby is a mess, and it encapsulates much of what is wrong with the carrier. They don’t have their customer in mind when making and changing policies. Instead, the focus is on reducing costs, and getting customers to change their behavior.

• No more running to the gate to catch an earlier flight. American now turns away nearly all customers who try to do this, even when there’s plenty of seats available.

• American pushes almost everyone to self-serve. Unless you have Platinum Pro status or higher in the AAdvantage program, you have to ‘do it yourself’ to standby, on the website or mobile app. And this now has to be done at least 45 minutes prior to departure.

People are getting stuck in airports for no good reason at all – because the airline thinks it lowers their costs, but by becoming less efficient and burning customer goodwill they’re actually both driving up expenses and costing themselves revenue.

The new customer-unfriendly policies are even contradictory with passengers trapped in the middle.

• Standby isn’t allowed if you have checked bags, unless you’re an AAdvantage elite.
  
• Once you check a bag, you can no longer add yourself to standby using American’s mobile tools.
  
• But Gold and Platinum elite members aren’t allowed to add themselves any other way.

In fact, if you ‘add bags’ on the app even when not checking in, you lose the ability to same-day standby for another flight. This cannot be removed from your reservation once added (I’ve not heard of any success in doing so via an agent). That means you would need to request standby at the gate, but for most members this is not allowed.

American Airlines allows their Gold and Platinum frequent flyers to stand by for a flight, even if they’ve checked bags. But they’ve programmed their systems not to allow it, and they won’t allow agents to do it for them any longer to save money. And they haven’t communicated any of this to customers.

An American Airlines spokesperson tells me,

We’re fortunate to enjoy an active dialogue with our AAdvantage members and take all their feedback seriously. We’re looking into this report, and will continue to work toward delivering a seamless travel experience for our customers.

Since current US Airways management took over, standby policies have been broken. They’ve been more focused on making sure customers don’t get a good deal with standby, potentially saving money, than on making sure customers get where they’re going. And they’re far less generous than Delta and United here.

In addition to not being able to seek an agent’s help to get on a different flight, passengers still have to follow their original routing. There may be plenty of space to get home through another hub, but outside of irregular operations, they can’t use it. Travel to or from a city with only one flight to the hub you’re ticketed through? You cannot standby or use same day confirmed change at all.

That undermines the entire value to the customer in having the largest domestic network and all those hubs.

American Airlines is not providing the tech tools to allow for self-service, and telling customers their only option is self-service. Gate agents can no longer do what they used to do for customers. That wastes passenger time, keeps them from getting home early and even on-time – suffering through delays unnecessarily – and keeps American from running an efficient operation moving passengers along and freeing up seats to get other people where they’re going or even seats to sell.

Meanwhile, same day standby was taken away from customers entirely when traveling on corporate PNRs back on March 1. Their primary message to investors over the past two months has been that they’re trying to make amends for walking away from travel agents and business travel. I asked whether this policy will be rolled back, but have not received a response.