[no-satisfaction]

How does this airlines manage to survive given its horrid customer service? My last booking this past weekend was the worst I have experienced, hands down, from any vendor in any industry (ever).

They not only screwed up the dates on an initial reservation (held until we could confirm a non-rundable timeshare in Kauai) we had from San Jose through LAX to Kauai, but when we tried to fix it, they wouldn't give us the four free tickets they initially told us we qualified for based on our AAdvatage points. We were told that the offer never existed and one of the managers we spoke with even intimated that we lied about the original reservation and the free tickets. If I spoke this way to a customer, I'd be rightfully fired!

The initial reservation agent said we qualified for four round trip tickets with a value of 45,000 AAdvantage points per ticket, which we had enough to cover. This later became 90,000 points per ticket RT. We were told we should be happy with the deal they were giving us, which was two free tickets costing us 90,000 award points each and two paid tickets at the purchase price of $750 each. I didn't take the offer initially because I had to think about whether I suddenly wanted to spend $1500 I hadn't budgeted.

When we called back 90 minutes later and spoke to a second manager, he said he couldn't make the deal the first manager gave us, which is absolute nonsense. He also let me know I should have "taken the deal." Hmmm... since when is having to unexpectedly fork out $1500 a deal? After I explained to him that we had booked a non-refundable timeshare based on incorrect information from American and pressed him for several minutes, he gave us the "deal." To his credit, he did save us another couple of hundred dollars that we would have had to spend to transfer miles from my Aadvantage account to my husband's. Even though I appreciated his creativity and friendliness at the start, he began speaking condescendingly to me partway through the conversation. The arrogance was astounding.

We spent between 3+ hours on the phone or on hold, spoke to two booking agents, one heartless supervisor and two managers, one of whom was a jerk and the other who was nice initially but became a jerk later on.

After this trip is done, I will never fly this airlines again. They don't deserve customers. The only thing I can imagine being worse than flying on American is having to work there. This attitude flows from the top.