[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by jimworcs

The above post is indicative of what is happening on this site. A customer complains with a totally legitimate complaint, and an airline employee seeks to "explain" totally unacceptable practice and makes suggestions as to what hoops the customer is expected to jump through in order to prevent it happening. In fact what is happening is the airlines are out of control, have lost any sense of customer service and frankly should be re-regulated.

In this case, the customer is advised to "call" immediately a flight is rescheduled, or get to the airport or contact the airline 24 hours before the flight departs, etc... But what we should really do is examine where the airline fell down and what the airline should do:

1. If the airline reschedules a flight, and people have pre-booked seats, they should transfer the bookings. I realise that this may sometimes be on a different aircraft type, but efforts should be made to put people together on the new flight, where they have been booked together previously. The reason they don't do this is because it would take an effort and the airlines have an arrogant attitude to their customers and don't care if they are inconvienced.

2. When they communicated with the customer, they failed to tell them their seat reservations had been cancelled. This would be a simple task, but again the airline reveals their contempt for the customer, and lack of care or regard for them.

3. When the customer notices the problem and contacts the airline asking for help, they are given another set of ridiculous hoops to jump through. Instead, they should have put a note into the customers reservation showing that the airline had let the customer down and when the seats are released they should be receive priority to make sure that they are "put right" and seated together, perhaps even putting a reminder note for the customer service agent to do this automatically without the customer having to contact them again.

What is sad, is the "helpful" response totally illustrates how low the airlines expectations of their staff and standards of customer service have fallen. Here we have an AA airline employee saying "unfortunately" the airline does this to many of it's customers. Really? Well maybe the airline should do something about it then. It is utterly pathetic

Did you miss the part where he said that the Department of Transportation requires certain seats to be blocked, until 24 hrs prior tp departure. I find it funny how people who have never worked for an airline, pretent to know why the airlines do what they do. The airlines have so many regulations places on them by the DOT, and the FAA, that there is so much they "can" do, and so much they "cannot" do.

I've worked for the airlines for many years. I know how, and why things happen. You can call them excuses, but the real complaint needs to be to the DOT, not the airlines, and the DOT places the restrictions on the airlines .... whether you want to believe it, or not!

The airlines were "de-regulated", but you'd be surprised just how many "regulations" still remain.