Originally published at: American Airlines rebooked a family vacation flight — making them leave from another country | Boing Boing
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AA is awful here. But the flight had been changed for 2-3 months and he didn’t know? “Burying it in an email” seems to be significantly downplaying this guy’s culpability. Emails with your itinerary are pretty easy to recognize.
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I mean… I can easily imagine someone reading an email that says “itinerary change” and thinking “okay, my flight leaves at 8:40 instead of 11:25, I can live with that” and not noticing that it also left from a completely different country because who the fuck would even think to check that? I’m surprised – but also not at all surprised – that the airline is even allowed to make that kind of change and just say “hey, we emailed you about it”. In a sane world, moving your departure airport across international boundaries is the kind of change that would require someone from the airline having an actual conversation with you and you saying “yes, that’s okay”. Radical thought, I know.
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Of course. It’s an American airline.
Coincidence that a popular Youtuber I follow just suffered issues with American Airlines tickets he’d booked being rescheduled to a later departure time that would make it physically impossible for him to make his connecting flight? Not as bad as relocating the flight to a completely different airport, but clearly AA is just doing whatever they like with people’s flights and assuming they can get away with it.
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The lack of consumer protections in the US means that they absolutely can get away with it.
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blaming the victim?
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I refuse to use AA any longer after every single flight was delayed, shuffled around, couldn’t fly because they didn’t have crew. Many times I wondered if I’d have to sleep in the airport as the delayed flights kept getting pushed past the last flight out time.
This wasn’t once or twice, it was every single time until I refused to book flights on AA any longer.
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I can agree with that. Nonetheless, even if you sort of ignored the first email I cannot imagine leaving the country without double-checking my itinerary. Maybe that’s just habit after decades of business travel.
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The Article links to Yahoo!, which sources it from businessinsider.com, which sources it from Denver7.
In that original version, it states:
Bound for the Caribbean in just a few days, Denver resident Sam Taussig thought he was just being overly cautious.
“I’m a frequent traveler, and this almost got me. On July 4th, I was being meticulous, and I logged into the American Airlines app to check our seating arrangements,” Taussig said of his family trip. “I wanted to ensure we were all sitting together.”
The article, which is dated the 13th of July, finishes
Taussig and his group will fly out this Friday, July 15.
So HE WAS DOUBLE CHECKING HIS ITINERARY BEFORE LEAVING THE COUNTRY.
My experience of airline confirmation emails is that they are information dense, with almost no concern for highlighting important information. Especially when there are nine people in the booking, who will have their own flight details included individually, and the the header is something like “here are the updated details of your booking”.
There are many, many, many details in these itineraries, and I can kind of understand him missing it if he didn’t immediately see in that flood of data that UVF appeared instead of SVD.
Maybe if the email had, up front, something like “WE HAVE CHANGED DETAILS OF YOUR BOOKING AS FOLLOWS:”, with a simple summary of the diff between the last version of the itinerary and the current version. “Your flight was AA666 to fly out of SVD Argyle Airport, St Vincent and the Grenadines. Your flight is now AA420 to fly out of UFV Herrawarra Airport, St Lucia. Please confirm that you have received and acknowledge these changes. Here are your rights if these new details are unacceptable. If you do not reply to this email in seven days, we will attempt to contact you again to make sure you are correctly informed.”
But I’m going to go on a limb and say that there was nothing like that. I’m going to make a wild guess that he got an unexpected email with nine complete itineraries in small print, and no up front explanation that anything had changed, and certainly no hint as to where to look for what might have changed. Just a firehose of small print, and an expectation that he has nothing better to do than cross check everything and hope he doesn’t miss something that he doesn’t know what it is he’s supposed to be looking for.
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“Re-ticketing the trip would cost him nearly $30,000…”
How lucky for American Airlines! My fee for breaching the contract I signed when I bought the tickets is $40,000, so your mistake will only cost you $10K to correct!"
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So HE WAS DOUBLE CHECKING HIS ITINERARY BEFORE LEAVING THE COUNTRY.
….There are many, many, many details in these itineraries, and I can kind of understand him missing it if he didn’t immediately see in that flood of data that UVF appeared instead of SVD.
The write up made it seem like they were away when they found out. That seems a lot more sane.
Itineraries aren’t that bad today, and one of the only things American does okay. The emails aren’t great but typically say that your itinerary has changed in the subject line and at the start of the email, and lists departing and arriving cities by code and plain language name.
Anyway, I’m certainly not here to defend American. A change like this is shitty.
And my original point that it’s weird to find this out while stuck away from home is moot, because that didn’t happen.
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Earlier this summer I flew Delta to a family vacation. Delta sent me an email with the subject “There’s Been a Change To Your Upcoming Trip.” Well, the first time I got this I checked and they had, indeed, canceled one of my flights and put me on a red-eye. Not acceptable, so I picked different flights.
But after that I got at least seven emails with the same subject line and same lack of details. Delta wanted me to go to my account on their website to see the changes. But when I did, there were no changes at all.
So, why can’t the email specify exactly what it is that has changed? Or, if you have to go to their website, why isn’t the change highlighted for you? Instead, I had to look at the details of every flight trying to see if it had changed.
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I thought this would be something like a flight out of Amsterdam being rebooked out of Brussels, not one that actually requires another flight to get to the departure airport.
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