AA has got a lot of bad reviews on this forum and plenty of other media outlets, and with good reason. I just wanted to tell a good story of what happened to my wife and I on a trip we were supposed to take, IAH-MIA on August 16th. My son had to go to the emergency in the afternoon on the 16th, we were still there at 6:15 pm when our flight was scheduled to leave. I had to call customer service around 5:45 because the web site would not let me cancel. Anyways the customer service couldn’t have been any better. After I gave my son’s name and all the hospital information they waived the $200 per ticket rebooking fee when we reschedule. I actually was shocked that they did that, but I was very appreciative as you can imagine. Special thanks to Susie the supervisor who made it happen. This is something I thought needed to be shared.

It is often a matter of connecting with the right person and using the proper approach. Glad you had a good experience.

well said Rural

As annoyed as I usually get with the typical AA changes and the frequent cancellation of my booked flights I usually find them to.be much as the OP suggested when there’s a true emergency necessitating airline assistance.

We had flown from Stewart Newburgh in NY to Charleston, SC due to a medical emergency with my Dad, and the morning of the day we were to fly home we got a call that DH’s Dad had a heart attack in FL and his situation was iffy at best. I tried to book something on AA to Tampa but they had no flights to get us there that day so we ended up using Delta to the tune of $500.00 each one way to Tampa, and more than twice what we paid for our r/t tix to SC.

After several days there and the situation improving we headed to the AA ticket counter at Tampa International in an attempt to salvage the return portion of our original AA SC tickets. We got to the airport and I was able to deal with a ticketing supervisor there who was wonderful. Having had a somewhat similar situation years before, I had obtained letters from both family doctors regarding the serious health situations of both parents and showed them to the agent. She just shook her head, commented about our week and then voided our original AA tickets home from Charleston to NY. She reissued us direct tickets from Tampa. AT NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE to us. No change fee, no cancellation fee and no up-charge for the fare difference plus she commented about wishing both sets of parents well with their health issues. I offered my credit card and her comment was I think you’ve already paid enough for this Trip! When we boarded we discovered the row five seats she booked us in were actually first class seats home.

They can be wonderful when they want to be, or at least they could be a few years ago. My situations have been positive for the most part so as frustrated as they sometimes make me, I try to remember those things, too

Knowing you Pat, I'm sure you were very nice to the person also, which certainly can't hurt. Supervisors can be very helpful and being nice and respectful to them, when many or most people are aggravated at their personal situation and take it out on someone else, who had nothing to do with creating the situation to begin with.

Well thank you for that, Carol, but in honesty, you know my motto - a little bit of sugar can usually turn the sourest lemons into lovely lemonade.

It's nice to read these real life stories with this airline. I truly hope that customer service will become paramount with AA and we'll hear more stories like this in the future. In reality I believe any airline would handle ARC's situation is the same manner (maybe not Spirit). A similar situation arose for us last year when we flew to Cancun and United went above and beyond what we expected. Sometimes even the airlines do nice things.

A few years back I had a situation with AA on an expired Passport. I flew from SEA to MIA and spent the night in MIA. When I went to check in Sat morning to SXM I was informed my passport was expired. AA went out of their way to assist me in how to expedite getting a new passport in MIA and also issued fake boarding passes on a flight departing that next Monday so I had something to show when I went to the Federal building to get a renewal. Once I got the renewal and called AA to confirm our flight, they then booked me on that flight and waved all rebooking charges.