Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Why it takes 21 hours to get from St. Louis to New York.

I feel it's my duty to inform people of the way American Airlines conducts business.  Basically they lie as much as possible until they're caught, at that point they make up a new lie to cover up the first one.  Finally when the truth comes out, you almost always discover that they lie to save money and basically don't care about totally screwing their customers.  Luckily, there was one AA employee who told it to us straight.
 
Remember the Jet Blue flight where they made the passengers sit on the runway for 9 hours?  Well, since then the Federal Government passed a law stating that if a plane sits on the runway for more than 3 hours, the airline will be fined $25,000 per passenger.  That's a potential fine of $1 million for a flight.  No one has been fined yet since the law was passed.  American Airlines' method of avoiding this fine is rather shady.
 
If air traffic control says there's congestion at the airport to which you are flying, they'll simply cancel the flight.  If there is congestion at the arrival location, then there's a very small possibility that the plane could be on the runway for more than 3 hours.  So rather than get their stuff together, they just avoid doing their jobs altogether.  For them it's financially sound because they don't have any risk on their part, but they never have an acceptable contingency plan for the passengers they are stranding.  Case in point is what happened to us yesterday.
 
At 9 am after being informed our flight was canceled, we were told that all other New York flights were sold out.  Our best option was to fly to Washington DC, rent cars, and drive home.  Of course the DC flight was delayed so by the time we got to Washington National airport it was Midnight.  After returning the rental car at Newark, I got home at 6:15 am.
 
I think that treating customers like this is unacceptable and something needs to be done about unethical ways in which Airlines conduct their business.

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