It's fraud. The only reason they offer you compensation if the flight is cancelled is due to regulations pushed by Ralph Nader. They get around that by lying, which s fraud.
Has happened to me multiple times going to FAT.
"Your flight is cancelled due to weather". BS. There is no bad weather in Phoenix or in Fresno. The problem is your crew is stuck somewhere else, and that shouldnt be my problem.
I too am curious what happened to James? He provided excellent posts.
I got caught up in this as well. I was in the mess of ORD yesterday and the freak snow storm that hit and, quite frankly, caught American completely unprepared. Compounded with the DFW issues the day before and the place was an operational hot mess. 1000 flights were canceled at ORD, including my connecting flight to Denver. I know they were not suspecting this as they had no warning of the potential and boarded me in DC to Chicago without any concern. The pilots even said just light snow is forecasted. It turned into a full on five hours of snow that at times were nearly white out conditions with high winds. No one was prepared.
There were, and I am not exaggerating, lines down the H concourse from security to the end of the concourse for rebooking. Admirals Club had at least 200 people waiting as well. I just grabbed an Uber and a hotel as there was no way I was waiting around for that. I called American and waited 6 hours for the call back...this as an exec plat. All I got was an offer for a flight on Thursday as everything else was now booked to Denver, even with connections, until then. I ended up buying a ticket on United for their first available flight on Tuesday. And of course, they will not refund me the unused portion of the ticket because it was weather related.
As a side note, there were at least 20 American aircraft that were stuck on the tarmac for over 3 hours with passengers so at least I know (or hope) that they will get some nice fines to pay for being completely unprepared for this snow event.
I actually had it happen to me before too. I had a delay back in January, EF showed maintenance, I decided to call a trip in vain. When I emailed customer service, they wrote back saying I wasn’t entitled a refund coz the delay was caused by, you guessed it, weather! Like wtf American
Guess it's time to start recording/videotaping every interaction with AA employees.
The fish rots from the head. Time for Dougie to go.
Once I received a hotel voucher from AA because I couldn't make a connection in CLT due to weather. Though it happened in May 2015 when the airline was still US Airways.
I hadn’t realized DL had discontinued their SBA-SLC service. I used that lot back when I lived in Santa Barbara.
Ultimately, AA continues to be a disappointing carrier, but I find DFW to be, consistently, the least reliable hub airport in the country. It has a huge number of weather related issues and AA is not well equipped to recover from them.
I appreciate the fact that you took the time to report this story. I might have been surprised by it had it not happened to me in much the same way. In my case, a delay that was caused by an equipment problem that later got blamed on the weather, which became a factor only due to the slipped departure time.
Due to being proactive and knowing options on other carriers, I was able to get a nice amount of miles for my inconvenience plus get switched to a nonstop flight later that Friday night from one that had a connection. It appeared that other folks who weren't as aggressive got nothing, except possibly a hotel room and a long itinerary on a Saturday.
I'm so glad you went public with this.
I was on a flight from Rome to DFW and we had to stop in Kansas City to refuel because, as the pilot explained, we had plenty of fuel to get to DFW but since DFW was closed as we were approaching, we did not have enough fuel to circle DFW indefinitely.
Our connecting flight was a short hop from Dallas but it was delayed a few times and then cancelled. However, both pilots and full crew were standing at the gate when the announcement was made so they got on the phone with AA and argued that they had a plane, they had fuel, they had pilots, they had crew and they had passengers. AA refused to let the flight leave.
The hold time with customer service was 1 hour so we checked into a hotel and continued calling, even as we were holding and calling on other phones the wait time according to their phone announcement went up to 5 hours.
I slept 5 hours and booked a flight on Southwest Airlines for 7 AM. As we were taking off, American Airlines customer service returned my call. I couldn't answer.
I've been home for 26 hours now and still have not been able to get American Airlines on the phone. But I did notice that for my convenience, they have booked me on a flight from Dallas for 4:30 pm today - almost 48 hours after my last cancellation. I won't be on it.
American did manage to get my luggage to my destination, it was waiting for me when I deplaned my Southwest flight.
American Airlines owes me about $600.
And, thank you Southwest, for running such a reliable airline!
This is business as usual for American. As a business traveler who flies MWF every week with them, this is par for the course. It is like they train their staff at their facility in Dallas to directly and knowingly lie to the customer. I even witnessed a gate agent at IAD break a phone when he slammed it down 6 weeks ago and told a line of cancelled flight customers to get out of his face. I recently saw a post where the CEO of AA was flying first class and had drinks spilled on him. I doubt he Evers misses a flight, connection, or flies anything beyond row 6.
"First let me acknowledge that American has had a couple of really tough days when it comes to weather. On Saturday there were storms in Dallas (including hail storms), causing significant cancelations. Then the East Coast had terrible weather yesterday..."
If LGA-DFW flight that your crew was on was delayed due to weather, wouldn't that make your flight's lack of staffing weather-related? I mean, I hate airlines as much as anybody but still...
@ William -- Two points:
-- The agent specifically told me the flight was canceled due to weather in Detroit, which isn't true
-- While it's true it's indirectly related to weather, there is an important distinction there; American clearly didn't have enough reserve flight attendants on hand, which could have prevented this, for example
@ William @ Todd -- Of course, but the specific designation of "canceled due to weather conditions at the destination" is what limited compensation options. There are other rules surrounding knock-on effects of weather.
The writer of this rant makes the implication that unavailable crew-members and weather events are mutually exclusive, and proceeds to accuse American of lying about it. Much of the time (in fact most of the time), a weather event causes both things to happen together, crews not making it to flights, and flights being delayed or cancelled. That's because crews get stranded just like passengers, and when their flight is late or cancelled, they don't make it to the downline station where perhaps there is a good airplane, and good weather, but no crew available. Operating a huge airline is incredibly complex with many moving pieces operating simultaneously and in sequence. Weather events will severely wreak havoc on any airline.
Sorry for double post - let me stipulate up front that I have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you look at AA flights from LGA-DFW yesterday on FlightAware (for example), there doesn't seem to be any LGA-DFW flight that would have been delayed in a way for any reason that would affect your DFW-DTW flight... #1056 arrived on time, #1263 was cancelled but would have gotten in way to early for the crew to then work your DTW flight... even on schedule the super-delayed #1608 would have arrived too late for the crew to staff DFW-DTW... if somebody wants to let me know what obvious fact/factor I'm missing, feel free, I'm very curious...
@Lucky - do you have a source for the difference in weather cancelations (direct vs. indirect)? I’m very interested in this.
@ David S -- There's nothing publicly published about this, but in terms of how the airline views it, there's a difference between a flight delayed directly by weather, and one delayed due to lack of available crew, aircraft, etc. For example, Europe has a similar distinction when it comes to EU261 compensation.
Lying happens all the time. The new norm is that they can cancel due to weather if there is bad weather anywhere in the US but not involving the origin, destination, or intended aircraft. AA has done that to me before.
Someday, the standard will become even more lax. "Cancel due to weather" will mean bad weather anywhere on Earth within the past 7 days.
I'm a free agent when it comes to flying these days, but when I think about it, I'm actually more of a "reverse elite." That means that instead of going out of my way to fly one particular airline, I go out of my way to AVOID one particular airline. And that's of course American Airlines.
AA 40 LAX-SAT was cancelled too yesterday on my way to the airport. They said due to weather although weather was perfect in LAX and SAT. They offered to rebook me for a flight 48 hours later. Absolutely pathetic airline. I ended up booking UA out of SNA today. 12.5k miles. Totally a breeze with UA and their agents. I rarely ever fly AA and usually Star Alliance only and now I know why. Now I have to put in a request for a refund. AA should just stop pretending to be an airline and close up shop.
I really hope you got to fly on one of Delta's new A220s as I heard they recently started flying DFW-DTW route.