Sunday, August 3, 2014

American Airlines Bad

It's been a while since my last vent against despicable corporate behavior. In this case the finger-of-disapproval is pointed at American Airlines. In this example, my daughter and a girl friend planned to take a cross country road trip which involved picking-up our car in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To get there, they had to fly to Albuquerque where another daughter would pick them up. Unfortunately, the girl friend's grandmother got sick at the last minute and my daughter's girl friend could not go.

No problem we thought. I could just use my daughter's girl friend's ticket. Well American Airlines claimed that the ticket was not transferable. That is unconscionable, tickets are for "renting" a seat on the airplane. Who is occupying that seat should not matter.

American Airlines also refused to give a refund on that ticket. I can sympathize, to a degree, with that position since the tickets were bought in advance at a discount. My sympathy with that, however, vaporizes with the fact that American Airlines would not provide reasonable customer service (allowing a ticket transfer) given the extenuating circumstance of the girl friend's grandmother getting sick. In a sense, American Airlines "rented" that seat twice.

Washington Post article: "The travel industry’s one-sided cancellation policies are due for cancellation".

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