Consumer Rant: American Airlines Sucks

Link to part II or http://bit.ly/AASucks2
Link to part III or http://bit.ly/AASucks3

Should you fly with an airline that screws you up and thinks that you should do your best to see their point of view? I think not - and that's why American Airlines sucks.

3 weeks ago, on October 12th, I had to visit a customer at Montreal. Due to the short notice, I could not find a ticket for a reasonable price, so I had to resort to an American Airlines flight from San Francisco. I had a few problems with American Airlines in the past, so I tended to avoid them over the last 5 years, but I was ready to give them another chance. Boy, was I disappointed (to say the least).

My flight had a connection in Chicago. I checked-in online, verified all is OK, arrived at SFO well ahead of time and arrived in Chicago early. And that's where my problem started. American Airlines has overbooked the flight to Montreal - big-time. About an hour and a half before the flight was due to leave, they started asking for 4, then 5 volunteers to stay behind for the night, for the "amazing" compensation of a $250 American Airlines certificate. Needless to say, the underwhelmed crowd did not volunteer. (Just for comparison's sake, I've heard calls for volunteers before, but usually these included an immediate booking with another airlines, and usually a much more generous compensation - I remember one overbooked Lufthansa flight were they offered 400 Euros in cash). They kept on announcing for more than an hour, asking for people with flexible plans.

Apparently, American Airlines sold more tickets than were seats on the plane and were taken by surprise when all ticket holders appeared for the flight on time. This is what airlines call "overbooking" and I call "outright theft". If you have a 100 seats, you should sell a 100 tickets. If a customer cancels or changes his booking - you charge him an exorbitant change fee ON TOP of what he already paid for the ticket - and make even more money. But if you sell 105 tickets to a 100 seat flight - you better have a contingency plan for a case 105 customers arrive. Oh, and muttering "that's just the way we do business" is not a contingency plan - more on that later.

The way I see it, if I buy a ticket, for a large chunk of money, to a certain destination, on a certain date - the only thing that can prevent me from making that flight is weather, a technical difficulty, or an act of God. Anything else is a breach of contract. Hey, try telling your airline that you are not willing to pay for your ticket, because you "overpaid".

10 minutes before boarding time, I heard my name called. I went to the check-in counter, and the attendant informed me that I just "volunteered" to spend the night in wonderful Chicago. They would not book me on a flight to Montreal with another airline (and both United and Air Canada fly to Montreal from Chicago) - presumably to save American Airlines some money.

I had a meeting planned that evening in Montreal, and an early start planned for the following day, so I tried convincing him my plans were not "flexible". To no avail. He told me that they sorted by the dates tickets were booked - and mine was booked just 7 days before the flight. That made no sense to me at all, but he wouldn't hear me further - he was busy selecting 4 other "volunteers". All the other people boarded the plane, and it left the gate. The attendant then gave us vouchers for a night at an airport hotel, a ticket on a flight the following day, and a $10 certificate for dinner (when I asked him what kind of a dinner he expected us to buy for $10, he said, and I quote "this is the maximum the computer allows me to give" - yeah, blame the computer).

And then came the "compensation". Since I didn't "volunteer" in time, but was forcefully taken off the flight, my compensation was to be either a certificate for $159, or a check for $102.29 (I'm not making this up). The other 4 people were offered $500 and $800 checks. When I asked why, the attendant claimed that compensation is given based on the ticket's fare. Again, he was not open to discussion. And I ask - how does the fare of the original ticket matter, when the ticket itself was not respected? And if my ticket was purchased with miles - how can you put a price to that?

Well, needless to say, my evening was shot. I had to call my customer and apologize (imagine how lame an excuse "they overbooked" sounds), leave the airport, sleep in a hotel, come back the following morning, clear security again ("take off your shoes, laptop, belt, watch....") and arrive at Montreal in the afternoon.

I got an email address for the Customer Relations person in charge of complaints from the attendant, and sent them a complaint email. After a week without reply, I tried finding another way.

The only way to submit a complaint to American Airlines is going to American Airlines’ site, and drill 4 levels down to a horrible, outdated web form, that forces you to fill in all your details (I counted 30+ fields) and limits you to 1500 characters. I filled it all in, and tried typing my complaint, but no matter how much I edited it, I couldn’t get below 1500 characters. I finally printed my complaint (PDF) and mailed it the old way. After a week, I received a reply email (PDF), containing the following:

Our seat management system is highly sophisticated (my emphasis GV), and usually we are able to accommodate every confirmed customer who shows up for a given flight. Inevitably, though, there will be rare occasions when there are not enough seats on the aircraft
…
The offer made to you was applicable based on the fare rules of your ticket. I'm sorry that we are unable to offer additional compensation
…
I know that you were inconvenienced, but hope that you will give us the opportunity to win back your respect.

Oh, and let's not forget the instructions on how to respond to this email:

This is an "outgoing only" email address. If you 'reply' to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.Please assist us in providing you with a timely response to any feedback you have for us by always sending us your email messages via AA.com at http://www.aa.com/customerrelations.

Ah yes, back to the amazing form. I took the time, filled in the form and send my response (link to PDF):

I received your reply to my complaint. It contained neither an apology, nor a satisfying explanation to what happened to me - just some vague corporate excuses. Your overbooking policies, described as “highly sophisticated” are based on an assumption that not all people will show up for a flight – with no provision for what happens if they do.
…
I also find your policy of compensating people by the fare they paid misplaced, to say the least. My ticket was purchased by my cousin for 50,000 miles + whatever fees you charged him. How do you put a price to that? And how do you put a price to the damage I incurred from being late? And is that price a $100?

And this morning I received their final reply, which I bring here with my interpretation of what the person who wrote it thought while typing:

Dear Mr. Vider: I'm sorry to hear that our overbooking policies and procedures do not meet with your approval.

(In other words - it's your fault for not getting our policies - not ours for making them.)

While we understand your position and regret your disappointment, we do have very specific policies and procedures, and we are unwilling to make an exception in your case.

(We could care less about you and customers in your position. We have corporate policies designed to increase our revenue. Be thankful you got a $100.)

Mr. Vider, we hope in time you will understand our position and again choose American for your travel.

(If you are ever stuck on a volcano island and the last flight you can take to save yourself is operated by American Airlines, we hope you'll be kind enough to forget our transgressions and take that flight. Or not - frankly, we couldn't care either way.)

The last thing I did today before typing this post was to send an email to the person who sent me those emails (I omitted her name from the quotes, as I’m hoping she’s representing her company, and not her personal opinions), and asked her permission to use her email to train customer relationships and support people on how to NOT WRITE TO CUSTOMERS.

So, this is why I think American Airlines Sucks, and I’ll do my best to share my opinion with the world. Look for the #AASucks channel on Twitter for some future activities I’m planning (maybe print some T-shirts, write a song... Stay tuned). To include the badge that appears at the top of this post in your blog, paste the following HTML into your post:

<a href="http://bit.ly/AASucks"
target="_blank" title="American Airlines sucks">
<img style="width: 175px; height: 91px; cursor: pointer;"
src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XRxpot-MK0s/SvC9QkPpHFI/AAAAAAAAPtg/3PWL-Xexxek/s400/AASucks.jpg"
border="0" />
</a>

All I ask from you, my readers, is to spread this story and link to this post, from your blog, twitter, Facebook – whatever you can do to spread this tale. Oh, and DON’T FLY WITH AMERICAN AIRLINES – they do not deserve your business.

Chicago, Twice

It’s been a busy 3 weeks for this poor traveler. This post will be a bit on the longish side, as I’ll try to cram travel, tech and personal experiences one on top of the other, so please bear with me. If I were less lazy, I would have posted more regularly, but pushing yourself to write, even if it’s your hobby, tends to get harder when you’re on the road.

Yes, I’m back on the road, after a month’s hiatus. To some degree I missed it. After 5 straight years on planes, trains and automobiles, I get bored to death working from home. But there’s nothing like some winter air-travel in the US to cure me from my airport addiction.

After looking at the first draft of this post, I decided to break it into several headings, to make some sense of the mess:

1. Montreal – backup your files!
I love Montreal. You can find it floating around my blog time and again. It’s one of the 4 cities I frequent the most on the planet (the others are NYC, London and Tel Aviv). It has some of the best restaurants I ever ate in, and has an overall look of a European city.

My customer in Montreal needed some software upgrades, network and devices tuning, and a backup solution. I cannot stress enough the importance of backups in this digital age. A simple thing like a hard disk failure can cause you to lose all your documents, presentations and large digital photo collection you’ve been taking all over the planet for the last 10 years. Setting up a backup device, with a daily/incremental backup task is quite easy, painless and extremely cheap (compared to the damage and grief of not backing up).

But what if your office burns down, or your house broken into and the thieves carry out every thing that has an AC cable?
To combat this, you need online backup. Not only would you still retain digital copies that have multiple backups of their own – but those will also be accessible everywhere, from every computer. I’ve been utilizing several such apps and services successfully for years now, so it was easy to set my customer up with an account with one of the leading backup services (I won’t mention its name yet – I might try to become an official reseller for that service).

2. Chicago – first time
On my way to Montreal, I connected at Chicago's O’hare airport. The airline I flew with overbooked the flight to Montreal – and guess what? Everyone who bought a ticket showed up. For an hour and a half they asked for volunteers to stay a night in Chicago, for the ridiculous compensation of a $250 certificate. Needless to say, there were no takers.

5 minutes before boarding, the attendant called out 5 names, mine included, and “volunteered” us to stay. No explanations or apologies. The compensation that was offered now was a $150 certificate, or a check for $100. A few other stupid things occurred after this, but suffice it to say I got stuck in Chicago for a night, had to leave the airport, return to it the next day (don’t you just love clearing security?) and missed my morning meeting with my customer.

By now you’re wondering why am I omitting all the relevant details and most importantly, the name of the airline. rest assured, I haven’t gotten soft: I sent the airline an email complaint 3 weeks ago, and a real snail-mail letter last Sunday. I’ll give them another week to respond/apologize. After that, they will be the deserving recipient of a Customer Rant post. Is there anyone in the audience skilled enough to help me mount a consumer campaign a-la United Breaks Guitars?

3. Hockey – the real prime-time sport
I lucked out and my visit to Montreal coincided with the first week of hockey season. I got to watch the Montreal Canadiens play (and sadly, lose) their 2 opening home games. I was seating at the best seats in the Bell Centre (thanks George!) and even met the Canadian Prime Minister Harper, who came to cheer his team (the Ottawa Senators).

I decided to embrace hockey as my favorite sport in this hemisphere, as it is the most dynamic and as closest to football (real football, not the American version) as you can get.

So I went to watch my local team with a friend (hola Diego!). We lucked out and the SJ Sharks (see that big shark head in the image? that's where the players emerge from at the beginning of the game), beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 6-3. I am now considering adopting them as “my” team. I wonder who I’ll cheer for when the Canadiens come to play here?

A funny thing that occurred during this game: after the Sharks' Dan Heatley scored a penalty goal, thousands of people (I'm not exaggerating here) started throwing their hats and caps into the rink. The maintenance people worked for several long minutes to clear all the hats of the ice, as more and more were thrown in. Our bench neighbor explained this is a tradition whenever a player scores a hat-trick (3 goals in one game). I tried capturing some of the action, but my Blackberry's camera is quite limited.

4. Zendcon – visit to the far side
Last year in October, I attended PDC, the Microsoft developers conference. This year, I decided to check how the “other side” lives. I followed up my visit to StackOverflow DevDay by visiting Zendcon – the PHP conference sponsored by Zend. I attended several announcements and sessions and enjoyed several lectures about how to run open-source, multi-contributor projects (hint: ego management). It was most informative and convinced me that I have still a lot to learn (and thanks to Eldad for the invite!).

5. Chicago – second time
My next customer visit took me to Chicago again. I got a chance to get stuck in O’hare again (although for a much shorter time). It was the first time I used Windows 7 and XP Mode to teach a class, and I’m very impressed – I decided to carry out all my future training sessions from XP Mode.

This also gave me a chance to catch up with old friends, and try Deep Dish Pizza – the local dish. Hint try one slice – that’s more than enough (and thanks to Ariel for introducing me to Ginno’s).

6. Yotta – it’s not a car
You’ve all must have heard about Gigabyte – a storage capacity size standing for a 1000 Megabytes (which is a million bytes). You have also heard of Terabyte – a 1000 Gigabyte, and maybe even of Exabyte (a 1000 Terabyte), and Petabyte (a 1000 Exabyte). But today was the first time I ever heard of Zetabyte (a 1000 Petabyte) and Yottabyte (a 1000 Zetabyte). Yes, there exists a storage unit that stands for 1,000,000,000,000,000GB (or 10^24 byte). Where, you may ask? According to this TechCrunch article, the amount of data the NSA intends to hold and analyze will be measured in Yottabytes by 2015. Scary.

7. Windows 7 – because they ran out of good OS names
I’ve been using Windows 7 for over a year now. I got the RTM version at the end of August, but the final drivers for my Thinkpad came out on the official release date, 10/22. Other than a couple of driver related issues (mostly the display driver), everything is peachy. I recommend it to everyone, although if you’re using Vista SP2, it’s very hard to find a compelling feature that will get you to update. I'll probably dedicate a future post to my Windows 7 experiences.

Other than that, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and I’m very impressed with the debugging and analysis features.

8. SSD – back in a flash
My next upgrade is a Solid State Drive (SSD) so I can get the maximum out of 7. Strangely, right now the SSD stock is in a flux, prompting many online sellers (notoriously Newegg) to hike prices for no good reason (i.e., an Intel X-25M 80GB drive, MSRP $225, will cost you about $400 on Newegg, and is out of stock on Amazon).

I think I’ll just wait for the stock to replenish before pursuing this further, and will of course report in a future post, once I get it.