I recently wrote about how I missed a connection while flying American from London to Chicago to Miami, with a delay that started due to a late inbound aircraft resulting from a maintenance issue.
Under UK261 regulations, that misconnect entitled me to £520 in cash compensation. I don’t make the laws, but those are the rules, so of course I made the request to receive that payout (just like an airline would charge me if I wanted to change flights, and there was a fare difference).
However, the customer relations representative who responded wasn’t truthful about the cause of the delay, blaming it on air traffic control. Even when I confronted him with facts to the contrary, he doubled down. Well, I now have an update…
American agrees to pay UK261 compensation that’s due
Yesterday afternoon, I received a phone call from American, so I answered. There was a nice woman on the line from American’s “customer success” department. I’m not sure if she called because of my blog post or because of my email back-and-forth — unfortunately I’d assume it’s due to the former.
She immediately apologized for what happened, and said that American would of course pay the government mandated compensation. She just asked me to confirm my address for sending the check. Okay, great!
She then asked me if I had any other questions. So I asked her about what exactly happened in my communications with her colleague. I explained to her that the flight notes with the reason for the delay were very clear, that the flight was primarily delayed due to a late arriving aircraft resulting from a maintenance issue.
I inquired as to whether she had any insights for why her colleague had insisted that there was an 81-minute delay resulting from an air traffic control issue, which simply wasn’t true. Of course I understand she’s a customer service representative and doesn’t make the rules, but still, I figured this was an important point to understand.
What was her answer?
- She explained that American’s notes on the cause of delays are pretty lengthy, and that maybe it was a newer representative who was answering my claim
- She explained that the notes for the flight did indicate that the flight was held due to air traffic control, but if you look more into the report, the majority of the delay was due to mechanical issues (this exactly matches what I explained in my email and in my post)
- She assumed that the previous representative didn’t see the part in the report about the mechanical issue, but she assured me that American will provide additional training so that this doesn’t happen again in the future
What do I make of this compensation saga?
I’m of course grateful that I got this issue resolved, though I also recognize that I likely only had a positive outcome because I wrote about this. I had waited to write about my experience until after I had some back-and-forth with agents and got nowhere, because I wanted to get the “real” experience.
Of course we have to be honest here, and acknowledge that making it very difficult to request government mandated compensation isn’t exclusive to American. When it comes to situations where airlines are forced to pay out, so many airlines lie, lie, lie, lie, and then lie a little more. Again, I’m not talking specifically about American, but that’s true of a majority of airlines, sadly.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had readers reach out with similar experiences across airlines. To me, it’s a real flaw of these government programs that mandate compensation. Great, you’re entitled to compensation, but the airlines will lie to no end to get out of paying it, and as consumers, we have limited recourse, short of suing, or something.
I appreciate that the representative actually addressed my question about why the other representative didn’t follow regulations. She was more transparent than I was expecting, in terms of confirming that the flight notes said exactly what I expected they would, about the primary cause of the delay being due to a late inbound aircraft resulting from a maintenance issue. That’s not just an opinion, it’s a fact.
That being said, does anyone believe that this was an honest oversight, and not part of a systematic attempt to deny compensation claims? I mean, in many ways, it would actually be worse if this were an oversight. I repeatedly provided the agent with proof, and he completely denied it, and even after some exchanges, he claimed to have “thoroughly reviewed” the file, and still didn’t change his stance.
Bottom line
I finally got my UK261 compensation request with American taken care of, as a friendly representative called and apologized, and immediately processed the claim. That being said, I suspect that this only happened because of my blog post (which I wrote about after an extensive exchange with customer relations).
The agent I spoke with insisted that it was an honest mistake, and that the other representative might have just been new, and not read the notes properly. However, given the way so many airlines act with these claims, I have a hard time believing that…
What’s sad here is that I’m not really sure what the moral of the story is. Usually I like to tackle these issues with hopes of bringing about positive change in terms of how airlines (and other travel providers) interact with customers. However, I don’t think this behavior will change, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. That’s frustrating.
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