American Airlines has quietly told employees to stop involuntarily bumping passengers, authorizing higher compensation and guaranteed rebooking to secure volunteers instead.
CHA CHA CHA CHING!!! 💰🤑
Only if there’s solidarity with your fellow affected passengers; if anyone is too eager for a mere $200 gift card, they’ll forgo the larger remedies (thousands of dollars). So, help educate yourself and others on that reality. If the airline is gonna oversell, they should pay.
While it’s nice that American Airlines is trying to do better here, it really shouldn’t be up to the airlines’ discretion; we should have a better baseline for all carriers operating in the US, so that involuntary denied boarding, as well as significant delays and cancellations under their control, lead to specific financial recovery for affected passengers, a real duty of care, reimbursement for alternative transportation if needed, and rebooking even with competitors if they can recover faster. It’ll never be perfect, but leaving it up to the airline usually just harms the passengers.
This is going to be hard for American though. Capacity on flights is rather thin in general since the majority of their flights are on regional jets. They'll need to start beefing back mainline routes with full-size jets again...
All that 'day of departure' talk seems to be based on the assumption that there are multiple daily departures when, in some cases, missing a flight might mean a 48+ hour delay in arriving at one's destination. Furthermore, there are references to 'federal' compensation amounts but I have never seen that word mentioned in relation to 261...so I'm wondering whether it's an initiative only covering domestic/N. American travel as opposed to being deployed systemwide.
There should be stricter rules on not refunding or re-accommodating no-shows (with certain exceptions caused by the airline).
If the seat is fully paid for, it shouldn’t make a difference, if it remains empty or not.
Lollllllll American is so bad. Nothing is going to improve, ever, until the government puts SOME kind of laws in place to protect passengers.
Compare the reliability of European carriers to that of the US. If airlines have something to lose, suddenly they can make things work.