How American Airlines is utterly terrible at customer service. | Hacker News Reader

How American Airlines is utterly terrible at customer service.

kylewritescode.com

33 pointskylebragger14 comments

Tips from a frequent traveller:

1) I consider a $5 tip to the curbside check in guy a form of flight ticket insurance.

2) Federal regulations mean they owe you when getting involuntarily bumped off flights, and the amount of actual USD compensation increases with the amount of time you wait. (This assumes they believe your "I was on time" story.)

3) When dealing with large bureaucracies, document document document. Conversations held verbally didn't happen. Do you have a notebook? If not, go buy a notebook from the gift shop right now. Get people's names and either badge or desk number (it's an airport, they all wear them prominently) every time you talk to them, and write down what they tell you.

4) I can explain at length why your priority is that low on the waitlist queue, but it boils down to "AA could piss off an entire conference worth of you and it still wouldn't cost more than losing one high-priority customer like a twice-weekly business traveller."

In other news, the sky is in fact blue. Of course airline customer service sucks.

The secret to dealing with any airline exception is not to run for the ticket counters with the mob -- call the 1-800 number immediately. The folks on the phone can usually do the same thing as someone at the counter, plus you don't have to stand in line.

Call your credit card company. They at least care if they lose your business. Have the flight payment refunded back to you and buy a new ticket. Then you won't be in standby anymore.

There is no "why" in this article; it is merely about the how.

Good point; updated.

I find it interesting how many companies I am in a bad relationship with. We never break up, it's just loveless or worse. Sometimes, it's simply too difficult to avoid using some companies. I wouldn't pick American, but I would pick United, AT&T and every fast food chain that operates on the Jersey Turnpike. A monopoly is a terrible thing...not to have.

On the other hand, I happily pay healthy margins to Apple and Amex.

The Jersey turnpike brings out the worst in everyone.

After you recover from the food poisoning from the Roy Rodgers or Bob's Big Boy on the turnpike, you're feeling pretty down. Then, the blues turn into rage as you drive down I-95 and Delaware hits you with $7 of tolls to drive like 20 miles.

Hack the tolls: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=I-9...

Get off the highway, take a break, get some cheap gas, and get on the highway after the tolls.

...and you have to pay those margins, in order to get the kind of customer service they provide. However, most people actually don't want better customer service: they want cheaper prices, which leads to competition for lower margins. If you want better service, you need to convince 99% of people to not purchase plane tickets from websites that sort by price (which, incidentally, is also how most people buy telephone service and even the food they eat). I mean, even hipmunk, with its "sort by agony" feature, still is heavily biased towards cheaper flights.

We're working toward an agony sort that has all of those subtleties baked into it, even weighted depending on how important they are to you. e.g., I'm quite price insensitive when it comes to wireless + power on my frequent NY<->SF route -- if you can keep me online and powered up for the whole flight, I'll pay for it.

Once we can take into consideration, say, subjective reviews of airlines, routes, etc, things get even more interesting.

Thanks for hipmunking in the meantime, though!

Wow. I missed a Delta flight in SF (that while I'll blame the PA system for anyone who listens, was entirely my own fault), and I ended up first on the standby list. I always got the impression agents put people who miss their flights pretty high on the priority list, as opposed to people who just feel like going standby.

Weird that treatment would be so different across airlines.

It depends. Airlines distinguish on their waitlists between those who've been inconvenienced entirely outside their control (aircraft mechanical delay even weather) vs. those who've missed their flights because they were late. Sounds like you got lucky and were listed as the former. Sounds like the blog author was the former but was classified as the latter. Neither mis-classification is rare from what I've seen as a very frequent traveler.

Idea: put some kind of link to American Airlines website/customer service in your website, so they can see your post as source of web traffic? They are probably "monitoring their brand," but still...

Not sure someone will click the link while reading the story

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