UPDATE: American Airlines responded to this post and has put us back on track to receive a refund for the canceled portion of our daughter’s flight. Customer service lives to see another day! Thank you, American Air.
Call me an entitled American, if you like, but there seems to be a wide gulf these days between the words “customer” and “service” in our society.
I’m talking about when you call the “customer service” line of a major corporation and have to work through 15 AI bots that can’t help with any of your issues before a human finally comes on the line.
And when you finally connect to a human, there’s little help and even less empathy. Try talking to the “loyalty” department at the phone company known as the Death Star.
But I’m not here to rage on AT&T today. I’ll save that for another time.
Today, I’m ranting about a recent experience with the customer service department at American Airlines. Here’s the story:
My daughter, who lives in Florida, flew home for a few days the second week of January. She was to fly out of OKC Will Rogers International Airport at 4 p.m. Saturday on the return trip.
We were planning on taking her to the airport mid-afternoon until … she got a text about noon that her flight to DFW had been canceled. Canceled!
And Sarah had a connecting flight that evening to Fort Lauderdale with a 7 p.m. departure.
My wife and I were about to jump in the car and drive her to Terminal C at DFW when Sarah received yet another text from the airline. She had been rebooked for a Sunday flight — with no input from her.
Things got tense at our house as Sarah told us how important it was to her to get back to Florida on Saturday night. She still had what I assumed to be a valid boarding pass for the 7 p.m. flight.
So, I got on the phone, called the American Airlines customer service line and actually got a human on the line with not much delay. When I told him about our dilemma, he took the flight information from me and said, “oh, she’s been rebooked for tomorrow.”
Yes, I know, but we are driving her down to DFW this afternoon to make the 7 p.m. flight to Fort Lauderdale.
“She won’t be able board that flight because she’s now booked for tomorrow. And the 7 p.m. Fort Lauderdale flight is completely full. anyway.”
We went back and forth for a few minutes, but he was clear that her boarding pass was no longer valid.
So, I hung up and walked back into our living room where I found my daughter talking to another American Airlines customer service person who was far more accommodating. This person told her that she could still use her Fort Lauderdale boarding pass for the 7 p.m. flight, although she might not have the same seat assignment.
Two customer service folks from the same airline with two different outcomes. A rain-on-our-parade from one and a ray of hope from the other.
So, I can’t call out everyone in their customer service department. Sometimes there are unexpected pleasant surprises.
We all piled into the car and headed south, made it to DFW and dropped her off at Terminal C at 5:15. Sarah’s boarding pass DID get her on the plane and she made the 7 p.m. flight without issue.
But then… I got to thinking. Hey, American, how about a little something for the effort? Like a refund for the canceled OKC-DFW portion of the flight.
We were out gas money and time to make the drive to Dallas and back.
The next day, I got back on the American Airlines website, clicked on the “refund” button and filled in our flight numbers. The website told me that we had no canceled flights for which we deserved a refund.
What? I’m assuming the airline decided that we had a boarding pass for the Sunday flight that we didn’t use. So we were owed nothing.
I immediately found the page where you can file a complaint and wrote out this entire scenario in the space provided.
The next day I receive an email with this message:
“Please accept my sincere apologies for the experience you’ve described. We’re committed to prioritizing our customers in everything we do, and your feedback highlights this commitment. Your valuable insights will be made available to our leadership team to explore necessary improvements and deliver the world-class customer experience you expect from us.
“I appreciate your willingness to share your feedback with us. From everyone at American Airlines, thank you for choosing to fly with us. We look forward to the opportunity to welcome you on board again soon.”
Arrgh! The email addressed nothing that I wrote in the complaint form.
American, where’s my #@%$ check? Stay tuned.
Jim Stafford's BlogOKC 