Company information:
American Airlines
United States
American Airlines: Never Again
Well, we had bad experiences traveling through AA. This wasn’t your regular bad: in the last 4 travels between me, my wife and my father-in-law, ALL of them had been pretty bad. All of them had to do with the terrible check in service at Huntsville International Airport (HSV). None of those checkins lasted less than 1 and a half hours when they should have been 5 minutes.
But the last one was the worst by far.
My wife already knew and we were dreading having to go through that experience again. But having a bunch of miles accumulated and a tight budget we had to bite the bullet and deal with their nonsense again. First nonsense of the day was when the lady there claimed the maximum was 50 pounds for the luggage… ok here we go again.
My wife, suspecting this was coming again since the same thing happened last time, waves a document issued by AA stating that international flights such as this one (to and from an overseas city, including the legs inside US) were 70 pounds maximum.
The AA lady doesn’t read it and proceeds to repeat the same garbage over and over. Finally, after some 20 minutes of back and forth she decides to call someone. She calls a… flight attendant!!?!?! Must have been her buddy or something. The women on the phone proceeds to tell her she is correct, 50 pounds max and that my wife will have to pay a $50 dollar fine.
My wife waves the document again and again stating: please read this. Is this not an AA policy? Do you question the validity of this? Why don’t you go access the same information… through one ear and out the other.
Sometime later the conversation turned into the AA lady stating to my wife, and I quote: “your daughter cannot travel for free…”. My wife takes out my daughter’s plane ticket, takes out the ticket receipt, and shows her: “oh this is not a receipt”. My wife explains: “here is the amount paid + tax + fee = total, it is printed in the same paper as a plane ticket but it is a receipt, AA said this is the receipt, we paid for it, please call the sale’s agent if your computer somehow doesn’t show. AA lady: “this is not a receipt, your daughter is not booked in the flight and she cannot go”. My wife: “that is fraud from AA”. At this point I loose it, yell at the AA lady and go away to take care of my screaming daughter (she is 1 year old).
And so the conversation goes on and on for 1 hour and 40 minutes. When it was 10 minutes before the plane departure time somehow, mysteriously, everything gets resolved, my wife gets her boarding passes, luggage gets checked in, no explanations given, no apologies, no nothing…
Draw your own conclusions folks, I drew mine for sure. Never again we are going to give our money these thieves.
