[jw50mayo]

My son and I purchased two tickets through priceline.com to attend a film festival in San Antonio, Texas. We purchased the tickets on December 30th and were set to fly from SeaTac airport on January 7th, at 11:40 am. We picked the flight that had the best arrival time in San Antonio and that ended up being American Airlines. We live near Yakima, Washington and had planned to travel over the pass early on the morning of the 7th. Unfortunately, a series of events began in Washington State that are still with us. Snoqualmie pass ended up being closed that morning because of landslide danger. So, we headed up over White Pass as that pass usually stays open during bad weather, even though it is about 75 miles out of the way. We got caught in a mudslide part way up the mountain and after being warned not to go any further after we were pulled out we headed home to make sure our vehicle was okay. In the meantime my wife called to see about changing our flight times. The airline put us on standby for 3:30 or 11:55 pm. But they said standby was only good for that day. I tried to see if there were any flights out of Yakima, but there weren’t. We knew we couldn’t make the 3:30 flight driving so we decided to take an around about route to try to make the 11:55 pm flight. That involved heading south over Satus pass then west to Portland and then up I-5 to Seattle. Unfortunately, I-5 ended up closing because of flooding. So we had to turn around with no way to make it to SeaTac airport. At that point I called American Airlines to see if they could change my flight to fly out of Portland. They said they could, but it would be the next morning and there would be fees of $750 per ticket. I about flipped as I paid only $218.00 per ticket originally. I could understand a transfer fee of $50 or $100 to change this at the last minute, but my tickets were paid for and there were available seats. I got nowhere with the customer service rep, so I was transferred to a supervisor. He was even worse. Basically he refused to even consider that fact that there was no way to reach the airport and that every access point to Seattle was flooded out. The only way he could consider any adjustment would be if there was an issue with the airport, which there wasn’t. I asked to speak to his superior and he said that his supervisor doesn’t take any phone calls. Besides, he said, he had the authority to help me out but he wasn’t going to. He did not care that I wasn’t about to do business with American Airlines again. I just wanted him to extend standby until 6:00 am which was when the flight from Portland was going to leave. We weren’t about to pay $1500 more to fly, so we gave up. Our tickets are still there, but to make changes for the future we have to pay $150 per ticket, plus any addition costs. We drove almost 600 miles to make this flight that day. It wasn’t like we didn’t try. It would have been nice if the airline could have helped us out, but I honestly don’t think customer service is in their job description.

The question I have is this - Is American Airlines being so poorly run that they have to extort money from customers to try to make up for their losses?

Interestingly enough, the film festival had a policy of no refunds, but when I explained our dilemma they promptly refund what we paid. That was attentive customer service.