Well, my venting on prune was in fact very restrained. In a 4 page letter to executives in DFW, I was a little more forthright.
I did not feel that others on prune would want to hear me winging on about the myriad issues that I raised, but the gist was that we paid quite a lot more to --- yes AA --- to get specific seats, then got shoved down the back where we froze; some PAX had blankets round their heads. The food we wanted run out one row ahead etc. etc. it was just a poor show except for the good seat pitch.
It’s what happened on arrival that caused me to go into total melt-down. We had been 9 mins late on stand having crossed the Atlantic in average time. No excuses there.
In 30 years of paxing to the US this was the quickest we have ever got through customs and immigration. The secondary security check was a pain, literally, as we had to heave cases up to the belt ourselves (old fogies should not have to do this with hold baggage.) We were on our own. Navigating to the gate at the other end of the universe was facilitated by hijacking a pax transport driven by the daughter of Fangio. We made that distant gate in what must have been an all time record at DFW only to see the a/c on stand, with no chance of boarding.
I put it to the young lady, that said that she was management, that it was inappropriate for my bags to be on board……etc this is when it got really silly.
The 4 page letter and a 40 min. phone conversation to a senior manager at Dallas some weeks later, produced……nothing. But upgrades, comps of some sort, do not matter. They are one of a million complaints that are heard and then forgotten in this industry. What is significant is that AA senior management’s response to the safety issue was to give me the address of the TSA. Hah!
I asked this stone wall that I was speaking to, if he had any awareness of the crew/TSA relationships that were currently a major issue in this industry. He said that he did not bother with reading such stuff. I then put it to him that AA crews v TAS were the main topic that I was reading. A totally negative response.
When you hear of the biggest loss in corporate history and get this kind of response to a very calm and detailed communication with HQ, is it a wonder that we are nervously waiting for one of the biggest collapses in the history of aviation.