Could American Airlines Be More Clueless?

A few minutes ago, CNN tweeted that 3,300 flights have been cancelled due to the impending blizzard.   I was checking some information and ran across this at the American Airlines web site:

In other words, while they will (sarc on) "graciously" (sarc off) waive the change fee -- they will only charge you the same fare if they have the same fare on the (now overcrowded due to the cancellations) new flight. That is what they mean by "original inventory required?"

For example, assume you have a $300 "W class" fare. If all of the "W" seats are sold out (likely) they may charge, say, $600 Y fare on your new flight. I had this happen to friends of mine flying American Airlines back from Mexico after a hurricane caused a blizzard of cancellations.

Please take a look at my Airline Crisis Survival Guide. It is free, unbiased and has received high praise inside and outside of the travel industry.

Addition at 9:50pm EST. Here is a discussion of this topic at Flyertalk. They are already noticing that most of the discounted inventory is already sold out.

Comments

  1. Remember the night we were trying to get from DC back to Wichita (through Dallas) on AA, who held us on the ground for around 4 hours because they refused to route their flights AROUND the back end of the front so they could landed safely after it had cleared DFW? You SHOWED the radar imagery to the pilots on your PDA, but they refused to talk with flight ops that this massive system operations was completely avoidable.

    This event happened AFTER American Airlines had canned their met ops department. After all, why should an airline be wasting $$ on having their own meteorologists when the world has the Weather Channel?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Valerie and I worked together for a time at WeatherData, Inc. AA completely messed up a weather situation and then stranded us at DFW after assuring us -- multiple times -- we would make it back. [I was much more trusting of the airlines those days.] We ended up renting a car and driving back to Wichita...arriving about 5am. We had an 8:30am meeting.

    The only airlines that employ in-house meteorologists today are Delta, FedEx, and UPS.

    ReplyDelete

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