Had a horrific experience with AA yesterday that I wanted to share as a way to vent my frustration.
I was (finally) cancelling the flight to the Maldives in April booked using dh's points, so called to cancel and have the points re-deposited. Chose the cb option, waited just over an hour for the call. CSR said that because it was booked using points she had to transfer me to another department. I was on hold for approx. 15 mins; while talking to second CSR I was browsing the AA app to see if I had any other flights to cancel when I noticed that there was a flight to Chicago in May showing. I don't have any flights to Chicago booked, so clicked through to the details and saw that AA had re-routed my and dd's May flight (from YYZ to JFK and JFK to LHR on first class) to YYZ to ORD, ORD to LHR in biz class (departing YYZ at 6:00am and landing in LHR the next day at 6:30am
). After browsing flights with the CSR I selected YYZ to LGA (11am), JFK to LHR (depart 6:30pm land 6:30am) to get first class seats (as many of you know I have been on a never-ending quest to finally sit in first class and get coveted pjs). Being the trusting sole that I am I disconnected the call. A few hours later I noticed that points from the cancelled flight were still not back in dh's account and my flight was still showing YYZ to ORD, ORD to LHR. Ugh. So I decided to call back.
This time the wait for a cb was 2.25 hours. When it finally came the CSR said that they had to transfer me to "International redemptions" and the wait time "shouldn't be too long". Wellll, this time there was no option to have the system cb, so I sat on hold. And sat. And sat. And sat. After 3.5 hours I decided to use the chat. This time the connection was pretty quick and Wanza, the agent, was able to get the miles back into dh's account in a few mins. However Wanza confirmed that the CSR that I spoke with in the morning never made the flight change and that she couldn't complete it, she'd have to transfer me another department. The chat sequence indicated a 5-10 minute wait, which changed to 20-25 mins. Finally got a message that I was 8th in line and after 20 mins another chat picked up. This agent was beyond awful, but since I was
still on hold on the phone (over 4 hours) I continued with the chat. The new chat agent was unbelievably slow and I had to repeat myself numerous times; agent said that she was dealing with multiple customers simultaneously and was having difficulty remembering the details of each customer. Extremely frustrating. After 90 mins (total) on chat the agent was finally able to change the May flights; checked the booking and the changes were showing. Disconnected chat and hung up the call -- total time on hold for a live agent is showing as 5 hours, 17 mins and no one had picked up. Crazy.