Your airline complaint of the day. Who's to blame in this case?
Posted by
ty97
Jul 16 '09, 06:48
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AA Assistance Failure - Grandmother Lost in NYC
So last month i used miles to book an award ticket for my wife's 84 year old grandmother to visit my in-laws. MVD-BOS. She flew up and when changing planes in JFK they canceled her flight and put her on one which arrived 2 hours earlier. That wasn't such a big deal.
In both directions we asked for wheel chair assistance. Abuela can walk, but not very far, and at least in Miami, where she had to change planes, sometimes it's quite a long walk. Much longer than she can do. On the way up we got assistance and it wasn't a big deal.
On the way back, we noticed that somehow she was flying BOS-LGA JFK-EZE-MVD.... well there's no way wheel chair assistance is going to get you from one airport to another. At first they didn't want to change but we pushed and they got her on a BOS-JFK-MIA-MVD flight instead.
This is where things started to fall apart. When she arrived in JFK there were weather problems and the MIA flight was canceled. Abuela is 84 and speaks only spanish. The wheel chair assistance gave her a voucher, but didn't say what it was for, and put her on a shuttle bus. The bus drove her around new york for a couple of hours, and eventually left her as the lass passenger on the street, in the rain, at 1am, in front of a hotel.
Now we were looking at the flights, and when we saw her flight was canceled we started trying to figure out what happened. We spent 4 hours calling AA fruitlessly before eventually tracking down an agent in JFK who was helpful and figured out what hotel she was taken to.
When we called the hotel, now almost 3am, we eventually got them to put us through and talked to Grandma. This was the first time that she'd been told what was happening! She had been given food vouchers, but then taken to a hotel which didn't have a restaurant. We looked up a late night pizza place and ordered her a pizza. Needless to say grandma completely panicked that she'd be whisked away from the airport and dumped on the street in the middle of the night in the rain in front of a hotel, that we had to talk her in to trusting that she'd eventually be able to get back to the airport and on a plane.
In the morning, again, no assistance folks showed up, we had to get the front desk to write out her flight number and a request in english that she needed wheel chair assistance. They refused several times, but eventually agreed and gave her the note to show when she arrived back at JFK.
I'm perfectly fine with if we had to pay something like $50 each way for assistance. But what i'm really shocked by is that when somebody needs assistance that they not be pushed around then left hanging. It was a flight to Buenos Aires which was canceled. It would not have been hard for the assistance people to find a ready translator to explain to her at least what was going on, what the papers they were handing her were, and when here flight was.
Disappointed in AA,
r
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