American Airlines

[snip long rant]

Would you go to a restaurant that couldn't find its cook and waiters and
got
you your meal after leaving you in the parking lot for an hour and a half?
Don't do it. Fly foreign carriers outside the US--they're better--and the
econolines domestically when possible: JetBlue, AirTran, Southwest,
Frontier. They're all good. If you subsidize lousy performance, you get
more
of it. If second-rate airlines go out of business, tough.


Have to agree, European airlines are supurb in terms of customer service
compared to most US carriers.

In article ,
"freeda" wrote:

[snip long rant]

Would you go to a restaurant that couldn't find its cook and waiters and
got
you your meal after leaving you in the parking lot for an hour and a half?
Don't do it. Fly foreign carriers outside the US--they're better--and the
econolines domestically when possible: JetBlue, AirTran, Southwest,
Frontier. They're all good. If you subsidize lousy performance, you get
more
of it. If second-rate airlines go out of business, tough.


Have to agree, European airlines are supurb in terms of customer service
compared to most US carriers.



I spent $6 to call BA while in Berlin :-(

jay
Sun, Dec 14, 2003


--

Legend insists that as he finished his abject...
Galileo muttered under his breath: "Nevertheless, it does move."

Thought I'd pass this one along. It's not jut AA, but commercial aviation
in general. Even before 9/11 I looked forward to flying about as much as I
did a root canal ----


American Airlines

Like Sinus Drainage, But With Wings


You've heard of air rage? I've got it. I'm building an invisible plastic
chain-saw with a six-hundred horse motor to cut the wings off every airplane
owned by American Airlines, before chopping the flight crews into runny
gruel.

Friday morning, August first, San Francisco International. I showed up to
catch a hop, AA 482, to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to Guadalajara. The line
in front of the American ticketing was just flat huge. For an hour and
twenty minutes by my watch people waited to check in. Yet between two thirds
and three-quarters of the check-in desks were closed. American, presumably
wanting to save a nickel, preferred that we stand there like cattle. We did.

The flight left way late. Why? American couldn't find a vital stewardess.
Yes. Just misplaced her. Maybe they left her behind a seat cushion. Who
knows? In any event, a whole plane-load of people with things to do had to
wait, and wait, and wait.

Incompetent management. Airlines know they need stewardesses. Thing is, the
airlines also know that the public will accept any degree of
inconsideration, stupidity, and humiliation. Which is why we get them. We're
patsies.

Next, clonking down the jetway, we picked up our Bistro Bags. You know,
nasty little sandwich, nickel bag of chips, thingy of peeled dwarf carrots.
They call them Bistro Bags because somebody in marketing figured it would
make us think we were having a European Dining Experience instead of a sorry
bag-lunch. We boarded. No one actually said "Moo."

The cabin crew were par: Not quite surly, but not under any constraint to be
agreeable. The major US airlines barely tolerate customers. One suspects
that they would be happier without them.

Off we took, finally, after the usual claptrap read from a card at high
speed about how to fasten our seat belts and how the stews are there for our
safety. Actually they're just waitresses. Hoping to sleep, I slid into the
vague unpleasant torpor that flying has become. Normally people put
themselves to sleep by counting sheep. On these aerial Greyhound buses I
pretend that I have leprosy and count my fingers falling off.

American squeezes you relentlessly. To deaden the ambience I asked for a
dismal little bottle of bad white wine. Five bucks. Decent airlines, meaning
foreign ones, don't try to milk you for everything from beer to headphones.

Predictably, the waitress didn't have change for a twenty. Why not? It's a
common bill. Maybe she didn't know she was going to need change when selling
drinks. How could she? After all, she had only done it four times a day for
ten years. Maybe the association just hadn't quite flowered in her neural
thickets: "Urg.Sell things.need change.Ahhh!" I pictured an evolutionarily
advanced monkey learning how to poke at a coconut with a stick and shrieking
with delight when it fell. She said she would come back. But didn't.

Over an hour later we were preparing to land, and still no change. The stew
was forward, gabbling with her accomplices. Was she going to remember or
wasn't she? The odds looked bad. I politely asked a near-by crewmember, a
blonde kid with bad teeth who looked to be maybe twenty-four, if he would
check on it.

He crossed the line from barely civil to deliberately snotty. "Sirrrrr! We
aren't going anywhere," followed by loud remarks, intended for me, to a
passing stew: "He wants his change. Hey, the ATM's broken." Clever little
wunx.

He knew he could get away with it. This is the operating principle of the
domestic air-transport business: You can get away with it. Lousy food, late
arrivals, missed connections, surliness, gouging. These engaging traits once
characterized Aeroflot, but they've migrated.

The preponderance of power lies with the airlines, and they know it. Any
remonstrance and they can make an air-rage beef out of it and you miss your
next flight. They figure the public has no recourse.

Finally, DFW. I needed to make the connection because people were waiting
for me in Guad. But with American, making a connection doesn't really help.
My next flight, AA 1401, couldn't leave because they couldn't find the
pilot. So help me. No pilot.

Why not? Was he hung over? Still drunk? Couldn't find the airport? Didn't
feel like working? In a lineup at the local precinct? Who knows?

Perhaps American will think I'm being too demanding-another sorehead
customer. Maybe they are right. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect airlines
to provide certain things: ant farms, say, or the Bhagavad Gita in Swedish,
or a Faberge egg, or a pilot. I mean, how could American predict that it
might need a pilot?

We sat, and sweated, and sat. Finally they told us that they had found a
pilot, but that he was on another airplane. How very useful.

Either they can't staff their aircraft, or just don't care. It doesn't have
to be this way. Used to be, flying United out of Dulles to the Far East, I
always actually flew All Nippon Airways, which code-shared with United. ANA
amounted to a major upgrade. Seats were larger, the food was great, the
flight attendants hadn't recently graduated from prison-matron school, and
they didn't try to gouge you for after-dinner cordials or a stray brew.

Now, I know that American has not the slightest interest in me or anything I
might possibly do. (Of course, they don't know about the invisible plastic
chain saw.) I fly only six or eight times a year, only two of those being
long hauls to Asia. Business fliers are presumably American's money. I don't
count. I know it. Still, what I did was call Claudia at my travel agency and
tell her never, ever to book me on American, and always to choose a non-US
airline when prices were close.

Nonetheless I note with delight that United Airlines went bankrupt (it's as
bad as American, except that it usually has pilots), and American teeters on
the edge. I hope it drops. Companies that peddle a sorry product with
wretched service and abrasive personnel desperately need extinction. I'll
celebrate with ribs and beer.

Would you go to a restaurant that couldn't find its cook and waiters and got
you your meal after leaving you in the parking lot for an hour and a half?
Don't do it. Fly foreign carriers outside the US--they're better--and the
econolines domestically when possible: JetBlue, AirTran, Southwest,
Frontier. They're all good. If you subsidize lousy performance, you get more
of it. If second-rate airlines go out of business, tough.

Splendid, in fact.



http://www.fredoneverything.net/AmericanAirlines.shtml

In article , says...
You've heard of air rage? I've got it. I'm building an invisible plastic
chain-saw with a six-hundred horse motor to cut the wings off every airplane
owned by American Airlines, before chopping the flight crews into runny
gruel.

Friday morning, August first, San Francisco International. I showed up to
catch a hop, AA 482, to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to Guadalajara. The line
in front of the American ticketing was just flat huge. For an hour and
twenty minutes by my watch people waited to check in. Yet between two thirds
and three-quarters of the check-in desks were closed. American, presumably
wanting to save a nickel, preferred that we stand there like cattle. We did.

The flight left way late. Why? American couldn't find a vital stewardess.
Yes. Just misplaced her. Maybe they left her behind a seat cushion. Who
knows? In any event, a whole plane-load of people with things to do had to
wait, and wait, and wait.

Incompetent management. Airlines know they need stewardesses. Thing is, the
airlines also know that the public will accept any degree of
inconsideration, stupidity, and humiliation. Which is why we get them. We're
patsies.

Next, clonking down the jetway, we picked up our Bistro Bags. You know,
nasty little sandwich, nickel bag of chips, thingy of peeled dwarf carrots.
They call them Bistro Bags because somebody in marketing figured it would
make us think we were having a European Dining Experience instead of a sorry
bag-lunch. We boarded. No one actually said "Moo."

The cabin crew were par: Not quite surly, but not under any constraint to be
agreeable. The major US airlines barely tolerate customers. One suspects
that they would be happier without them.

Off we took, finally, after the usual claptrap read from a card at high
speed about how to fasten our seat belts and how the stews are there for our
safety. Actually they're just waitresses. Hoping to sleep, I slid into the
vague unpleasant torpor that flying has become. Normally people put
themselves to sleep by counting sheep. On these aerial Greyhound buses I
pretend that I have leprosy and count my fingers falling off.

American squeezes you relentlessly. To deaden the ambience I asked for a
dismal little bottle of bad white wine. Five bucks. Decent airlines, meaning
foreign ones, don't try to milk you for everything from beer to headphones.

Predictably, the waitress didn't have change for a twenty. Why not? It's a
common bill. Maybe she didn't know she was going to need change when selling
drinks. How could she? After all, she had only done it four times a day for
ten years. Maybe the association just hadn't quite flowered in her neural
thickets: "Urg.Sell things.need change.Ahhh!" I pictured an evolutionarily
advanced monkey learning how to poke at a coconut with a stick and shrieking
with delight when it fell. She said she would come back. But didn't.

Over an hour later we were preparing to land, and still no change. The stew
was forward, gabbling with her accomplices. Was she going to remember or
wasn't she? The odds looked bad. I politely asked a near-by crewmember, a
blonde kid with bad teeth who looked to be maybe twenty-four, if he would
check on it.

He crossed the line from barely civil to deliberately snotty. "Sirrrrr! We
aren't going anywhere," followed by loud remarks, intended for me, to a
passing stew: "He wants his change. Hey, the ATM's broken." Clever little
wunx.

He knew he could get away with it. This is the operating principle of the
domestic air-transport business: You can get away with it. Lousy food, late
arrivals, missed connections, surliness, gouging. These engaging traits once
characterized Aeroflot, but they've migrated.

The preponderance of power lies with the airlines, and they know it. Any
remonstrance and they can make an air-rage beef out of it and you miss your
next flight. They figure the public has no recourse.

Finally, DFW. I needed to make the connection because people were waiting
for me in Guad. But with American, making a connection doesn't really help.
My next flight, AA 1401, couldn't leave because they couldn't find the
pilot. So help me. No pilot.

Why not? Was he hung over? Still drunk? Couldn't find the airport? Didn't
feel like working? In a lineup at the local precinct? Who knows?

Perhaps American will think I'm being too demanding-another sorehead
customer. Maybe they are right. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect airlines
to provide certain things: ant farms, say, or the Bhagavad Gita in Swedish,
or a Faberge egg, or a pilot. I mean, how could American predict that it
might need a pilot?

We sat, and sweated, and sat. Finally they told us that they had found a
pilot, but that he was on another airplane. How very useful.

Either they can't staff their aircraft, or just don't care. It doesn't have
to be this way. Used to be, flying United out of Dulles to the Far East, I
always actually flew All Nippon Airways, which code-shared with United. ANA
amounted to a major upgrade. Seats were larger, the food was great, the
flight attendants hadn't recently graduated from prison-matron school, and
they didn't try to gouge you for after-dinner cordials or a stray brew.

Now, I know that American has not the slightest interest in me or anything I
might possibly do. (Of course, they don't know about the invisible plastic
chain saw.) I fly only six or eight times a year, only two of those being
long hauls to Asia. Business fliers are presumably American's money. I don't
count. I know it. Still, what I did was call Claudia at my travel agency and
tell her never, ever to book me on American, and always to choose a non-US
airline when prices were close.

Nonetheless I note with delight that United Airlines went bankrupt (it's as
bad as American, except that it usually has pilots), and American teeters on
the edge. I hope it drops. Companies that peddle a sorry product with
wretched service and abrasive personnel desperately need extinction. I'll
celebrate with ribs and beer.

Would you go to a restaurant that couldn't find its cook and waiters and got
you your meal after leaving you in the parking lot for an hour and a half?
Don't do it. Fly foreign carriers outside the US--they're better--and the
econolines domestically when possible: JetBlue, AirTran, Southwest,
Frontier. They're all good. If you subsidize lousy performance, you get more
of it. If second-rate airlines go out of business, tough.

Actually, I hear lots of whining about Southwest due to their free-for-
all seating policy.

Let's face it: All airlines suck ass in just about every way imaginable.

feh wrote in message ...
In article , says...
You've heard of air rage? I've got it.

Rant about less-than-satisfactory experience on American Airlines
deleted


Actually, I hear lots of whining about Southwest due to their free-for-
all seating policy.


Yes, that's my main beef with flying them. Basically, in order to get
a reasonable chance of a choice of seat, you have to arrive at least
an hour earlier than is necessary for check-in and security check.

Legroom in coach (that's all SWA flies anyway) is barely tolerable.
SWA is perfectly adequate for non-stop fights of less than 3 hours
duration. I've never had to make a connection at a hub with them, so
I don't know how well they handle that.

The lack of meal service on a transcontinental (i.e 7-8 hour) flight
is a serious lack on any airline. Unfortunately for me, Southwest
Airlines is about the only practical way for me to fly between BWI and
San Diego. At least they have through flights (that stop in
Albequerque.)

I've never had problems with customer service from ground or flight
crews on Southwest, or even AA or United, for that matter.

My only bad experience was an officious security weenie, about a month
after 9/11, who threatened a bunch of us in line with arrest, if we
didn't stop complaining. (He had opened a security checpoint, and
jumped some people ahead of us in the line -- this was back when the
lines for security snaked around the airports and 2-hour waits were
routiner.)

Let's face it: All airlines suck ass in just about every way imaginable.


The problem is that there's tremendous overcapacity in the system,
fares are deregulated, demand is down, which leads the airlines to
maximize their profits (or even just stay in business) by cutting
costs on the backs of their workers. Which gets passed on to the
customers. Pretty stupid for what is essentially a service industry.

The whole system is based on bottom-feeding bargain hunters, there
seems to be no market for an airline that charges you a bit more and
uses that to provide better-quality service. (I've heard that Jet
Blue is supposed to be a bit like that, but they don't fly to all that
many places, do they?)

Just to see what airline deregulation did, back in circa 1970, I used
to fly between the east coast and Chicago for a round trip of $116
(fully refundable ticket, they'd fly you out on a competitor line if
they had plane trouble, and they served a full meal on the 2-hour
flight.) That's about $525 in today's money. I'm pretty sure that's
it's not too hard to find current fares at half that price today. Is
this a good thing? Maybe, but if the airline is getting half the
money for the same trip, something has to give, no?

Back in the bad old days of airline regulation, people couldn't fly
becuase they couldn't afford it. Now that it's affordable, who wants
to do it, it's so unpleasant.

Ted