American Airline service complaints
 

Planning trip to St Thomas and best connection/fare is on AA. Have been seeing many complaints about poor service, equipment on AA. Should I go ahead with AA or do you advise a different airline? Thank you.

I flew AA to St. Thomas not long ago, and fly them across the country frequently.

Compared to CO or JetBlue much of their equipment is older and would benefit from a cabin upgrade. Compared to most other airlines there really is no difference.

They defered big purchases of new planes, and also stayed out of bankruptcy, unlike UAL, USAir, NWA, Delta....

I will be flying AA again 2 trips in the next 4 weeks. I'd make my choice based on flight schedules and $ first, especially since you are going on vacation.

I would fly AA, but then again, I'm known around these parts for being partial to their service :)

It's all subjective.

I live on STT & AA is the only one I care to fly. I used Delta ONCE in first class & was not pleased at all with the plane or service.

I will fly them domestically, and to the Caribbean, but I wouldn't fly them to Asia or Europe in economy. Too many cutbacks, and there are so many wonderful European and Asian Airlines.

OMG, a friend of mine called AA last night to try to change his seat assignment.He wanted window and had aisle .He is Platinum.They charged him $15 to change his seat assignment!! What next???? I think I would complain about that.

why not just change seats on www.aa.com?

Very easy and as a Plat, your friend can see ALL the available seats and pick any....

We like AA very much. They continue to earn our business. I think that their CSR's are first rate. We experienced a service interuption due to inclement weather in DFW last Dec. Explained our problem to the CSR (FLL pre cruise) and she switched us to CO within minutes. Website is good. Second choice is CO. These for domestic, for overseas flights we never book domestic airlines if at all possible (the one exception being Alitalia).

We made our reservation with AA last Spring while my wife was undergoing "very aggressive" treatment for Cancer. She wanted to visit her parents (she, myself and our 2 children would go )and we thought she would be well enough to do so.
When the time came for our trip she was still bed ridden and unable to travel. We had to cancel our trip. I wrote to AA's customer service and AA said that it did not matter one bit if we submitted letters from her doctors they would still charge us $100 each to reschedule our trip. Today I tried to redeem our credits for a new trip on AA and was told that my wife and I cannot use the credits from our children's tickets. Not only did we have to pay a penalty but we were not allowed to use our entire credit !

do not patronize American Airlines.

I suspect you got pretty much the same level of service at AA that you would have gotten, given the same facts, from any airline, so until I am shown that another airline treated you better, I'm not going to take your advice, if that is what it could be called, to avoid AA.

It is one thing to buy tickets when you are capable of flying, and then asking for an adjustment (or an insurance payment) when circumstances change. It is something else to buy the tickets knowing that you are unable to fly, but hoping that you will be sufficiently recovered to make the flight; in that situation, I don't think the airline should absorb the risk of your not recovering, as you put yourself into that situation. I think flight insurance would treat you the same way; if you revealed that you were unable to fly when you bought the tickets and tried to buy the insurance, they would probably decline to sell you a policy covering that loss. When they say preexisting conditions are covered, I think their fine print would likely say that such coverage is limited to preexisting conditions that worsen after you buy the tickets.

If your children are minors, you might approach the airline as custodian of minors and demand the airline deal with your, rather than the infants, on that basis; possibly an attorney could sort out that issue, but the attorney might cost more than you could recover.

Best wishes for your wife's recovery.

I'll say it again. If you know there is a chance of not using the tickets, forget insurance, just buy fully refundable tickets.

When buying non-refundable tickets you agreed to certain conditions. You entered into a contract. The airline sold you a cheaper ticket but in return told you that it's non-refundable (whatever the circumstance may be). Simple.

And once again, I wish the best for your wife and family!

We use AA a lot and have crossed the pond many times on AA and have not had a bad flight at all. I guess we have been lucky. Better than BA.

As for mikepapas, I'm sorry what happened to you, but it happened to us with DL. DH had a medical emergency the day before we were due to go on DL BDA-ATL-LAS flight, so I cancelled the flights. When time came around a few months later for us to rebook using the credit from the non-refundable tickets we had to pay the rebooking fee per person. So stop complaining about AA!! This applies to all airlines.

One time we were in LAS (on different trip - we used AA this time) my parents in UK had medical emergency and we had to cut the trip short to go home and then on to UK. AA allowed us to fly home a few days early and waived the date change fee. Back home I went on to book the UK flights ... BA would not offer compassionate fares but AA did (about $300 pp less). One parent passed away while we were in the UK.

BA has direct non-stop flights from here to London, but AA doesn't. We prefer AA via JFK over the direct BA.

We are die-hard AA travellers.