It is sad that AA is going down hill instead of going for great. This article states that American Airlines asked it's employees to describe the airline in 3 words.

https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/am ... d-sad.html




AA needs to improve the customer experience. United has improved, Southwest and Delta have as far as I know always been consistently good. What does AA need to do to improve? Removing a row of seats from each plane would be a good start?

Getting rid of Doug Parker and getting some new blood into the CEO position. He is not a leader.

Get rid of DP, and the management incompetents he brought over from America West. Bring in people who know how to run a world-class airline.

While you’re doing that, quit treating your employees like enemies while you smile sweetly at them. I hear DP’s army of incompetents pride themselves on saying how employee friendly they are while they are stabbing in them in the back.

I hate to say it but AA has the potential to overtake Delta in customer satisfaction but for the fact that the AA employees, who mostly supported the merger, have been beaten down.

I'm Gold with AA so I have traveled with them the last 2 yrs pretty often. Many of their customer service employees seem very hit or miss compared to DL WN and even UA. Half the time I board an AA flight the F/A is on their cell phone or having a conversation with another F/A that has nothing to do with work. Its nothing major but just an observation. I'm also Silver Medallion with DL and of the 4 largest I enjoy their service the most because it's consistently above average at the airport and during flight. Many of their employees are professional but very friendly.

Worse than Delta. 3 words that ring true.

My first thought is WTF

"Never fly Y"

"Itinerary will change"

"Happy FA's rare"

Clus Ter Feck

Well, after my last experience, where my IFE didn’t work, the Seat didn’t recline, the crew were awful, the food was cold....

So on that, I think ‘Absolutely F****** S***’ is pretty apt

OMAA

Many AA employees are so bitter! bitter at home; blame AA for everything and sadly take it on the customers. FAs lack basic knowledge about the competition and perform as if they were doing customers a favor. AA needs to implement a secret shopper initiative from the curb to baggage claim including the flight experience. Half of its customer service issues would be resolved. Employees (FAs) are barely held accountable; union representatives defend bad apples. :/ They don't even look the part...

Raging dumpster fire
Delta is winning
Going for broke
Fake news morale

chunhimlai wrote:

My first thought is WTF

Mine was POS.

Disappointing
Unfortunate
Awful

My entry for a 3 word description of AA is No F-ing Way.

The linked article is a little superficial.

More money was never going to make certain AA employee groups happy - they will always think they deserve yet more still. They've been conditioned - by AA/US/HP management, or by their union representation - to think reflexively that management is always screwing them.

MIflyer12 wrote:

The linked article is a little superficial.

More money was never going to make certain AA employee groups happy - they will always think they deserve yet more still. They've been conditioned - by AA/US/HP management, or by their union representation - to think reflexively that management is always screwing them.

The big issue with giving them more money was that nothing was asked for in exchange, and even looking at some of the more recent issues - like MCE having dedicated bins except FAs were told they don't have to enforce it, show that management is actively encouraging laziness. That is a huge issue IMO, and one they need to fix.

Hapless
Helpless
Hopeless

When AA and US merged, I thought, wow, two shitty airlines now become one shit airline.

Nine boarding groups

LCC took over

AA has great potential. I fly AA a lot and find their flight attendants to be great overall. Every airline has some poor performers and trust me, I’ve seen some doozies over here at Delta.

I find AA’s agents to be the weakest link.

I think all this is overblown. I have had plenty of good experiences with aa crew and some underwhelming ones. They are just getting kicked now due to their financial performance.

Adequately generous comfort.

SFOtoORD wrote:

Nine boarding groups

Lolz - this. And 75% of the plane boards in groups 1-4. So "preferred" boarding in group 5 is a total joke. Just like the rest of AA..

flyguy84 wrote:

SFOtoORD wrote:

Nine boarding groups

Lolz - this. And 75% of the plane boards in groups 1-4. So "preferred" boarding in group 5 is a total joke. Just like the rest of AA..

Is that really any different than DL? Maybe they should go to 175 boarding groups, like WN.

DeltaPrince wrote:

AA has great potential. I fly AA a lot and find their flight attendants to be great overall. Every airline has some poor performers and trust me, I’ve seen some doozies over here at Delta.

I find AA’s agents to be the weakest link.

I agree. AA's IROPPS handling is also not up to snuff IMO. I had a vacation disrupted by more than 24 hours by a cancellation over the summer and saw very little effort at same day recommodation despite my Platinum status. I cancelled and booked DL last minute for about the same fare. The late booking and a delay caused all sorts of confusion (beginning with bag tags only printing to our connecting city), and numerous DL agents went out of their way to assist us. Night and day.

Parker is greedy.

DeltaPrince wrote:

Get rid of DP, and the management incompetents he brought over from America West. Bring in people who know how to run a world-class airline.

While you’re doing that, quit treating your employees like enemies while you smile sweetly at them. I hear DP’s army of incompetents pride themselves on saying how employee friendly they are while they are stabbing in them in the back.

I hate to say it but AA has the potential to overtake Delta in customer satisfaction but for the fact that the AA employees, who mostly supported the merger, have been beaten down.

The grass is always greener somewhere else. The AA employees hated Tom Horton, Gerard J Arpey and Don Carty. Doug Parker promised the moon and look what they got.

DeltaXNA wrote:

It is sad that AA is going down hill instead of going for great. This article states that American Airlines asked it's employees to describe the airline in 3 words.

https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/am ... d-sad.html




AA needs to improve the customer experience. United has improved, Southwest and Delta have as far as I know always been consistently good. What does AA need to do to improve? Removing a row of seats from each plane would be a good start?

They need a major scandal, like Dr. Dao debacle.

That's the only way they can get their heads out of the ground and see how bad things really are.

dtw2hyd wrote:

Adequately generous comfort.

Thanks for the laugh this early in the morning..

Becoming Spirit Airlines

Take care of your employees and they will go above and behind for the customer. AA employees took pay cuts from 2003 thru 2015 they were lied to and taken advantage of from CEOS Carty/Horton so much so they saw DP as the CEO with a cape on he promised the world and he has failed to live up to those promises all the while turning the Luxury Liner into the Grey Hound of the skies.. So employees feel cheated lied to and the greatness what AA once was going away this will cause some very unhappy employees.

Parker has always been a greedy ( my pocket first" "leader"). Isom is a chip off the Parker shoulder. As long as the clueless board pays these morons with stock apprecations, passengers will always be the enemy. Isom lives this credo. Parker fuels it.

credit card miles

therefore i'll continue to fly with them. Also, I've rarely had a bad experience with AA. I've only been disappointed by an aa employee once, out of the thousands i've encountered. i think that a change in leadership might help, but it could also backfire in a spectacular way.

DFW's main carrier

While I love to fly on WN out of DAL, I had flown on AA on the last two times that I had flown to somewhere from DFW since I was going to SAV and TVC, destinations that aren't served by WN. AA also has more frequent flights to most of the destinations that are served nonstop from both DFW and DAL, and there is more demand for AA service out of DFW today than was the case prior to the repeal of the Wright Amendment on October 13, 2014.

As a lifetime Platinum AAdvantage, Shareholder from time to time, and a fairly frequent customer I truly lament the degradation from "Something Special in the Air" and " The On-Time Machine" airline of the 1980's, 90's, even the period after 9-11 when everyone pulled together. Now it seems that everyone is trying to pull it apart.

Many of our fellow posters have made quite obvious, and serious, suggestions for AA to get back on track. I heard many of them at a recent conference in Orlando where at least 5,000 of the attendees flew in on AA. AA is on the edge of losing premium paying Exec.Plats to DL in the southeast if they don't fix CLT and PHL darn quick.
Again, the obvious, but thing that add up quickly:
1.cut a row of seats back out..2 Add a 3rd Coach Lavatory on the 738's 3. fix the Max debacle (quick) 4. add another drink service. (2 on a 4.5 hour flight? really?) 5. Respect and empower your frontline employees more. 6.Fix the AAdvantage program..such an asset and you keep diminishing its' value . 7. Fix the schedules and get dispatch reliability up to 98-99%. 8. Since you are not putting any $ into the 763's, for the sake of your best customers order /lease some more 788 to replace them quickly. 9. Get with Boeing and get the 797 (MOM) plane committed to production. By the time they start coming off the line you will need to dump a bunch of old US 321's and the last 757's out to ROW. 10. Restore some widebody flights on a few key trunk domestic routes.

I just finished 4 flights on AA in South America. They did a nice job overall and were light years better than the flights I had on Latam during the same trip. I also flew on Avianca and found them to be really good!

No space bathrooms

I don't understand AA values. Are they going for LCC or a 5-star airline?

Let me ask this question. What do the employees think of Doug Parker? Remember that the employees decided to back US's plan to buy AA, because they felt that Doug Parker had a better vision for the future of AA than did Tom Horton. I know a few pilots, and they also felt that a combined AA/US would have the scale to successfully compete with UA and DL.

One of the things that Parker said repeatedly during his townhalls before the purchase completed was that US's route system didn't generate the kind of premium traffic that AA had. So, US could not offer the superior product that AA offered. The combined carrier could continue to offer AA's product, because of premium routes like JFK-LAX, JFK-LHR, and LGA-ORD and the revenue they generate.

Do employees feel like Parker was less than honest with his vision for the combined carrier?

Always Arriving Late (AAL)

ripcordd wrote:

Take care of your employees and they will go above and behind for the customer. AA employees took pay cuts from 2003 thru 2015 they were lied to and taken advantage of from CEOS Carty/Horton so much so they saw DP as the CEO with a cape on he promised the world and he has failed to live up to those promises all the while turning the Luxury Liner into the Grey Hound of the skies.. So employees feel cheated lied to and the greatness what AA once was going away this will cause some very unhappy employees.

What did Horton do other than taking AA into bankruptcy?

Carty screwed them deep and hard. Arpey was up front and honest with them, told them that this has to happen or bankruptcy is the only option. Arpey was forced out because he refused to take them into bankruptcy.

Horton approached the employee groups no different than Arpey, with a last ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy.

AA is what it's going to be for a long time to come. The culture has to change, and the opportunity to do that during the merger process was squandered. The needed culture change will take time as the old flushes out and new that can promote the change filter in. DP didn't cause this. He is but one factor in many. AA was like this before DP, US as well.

Having recently moved from Madison, WI to Tucson, AZ, I've flown AA more recently in the last month than any other airline. Definitely underwhelmed. Had a misconnect in PHX a few weeks ago where the gate agent for my second flight wouldn't hold the departure for 5 minutes to allow three connecting passengers from my delayed TUS-PHX flight to make it on board. I've had experiences on both DL and UA where the gate agents built some serious goodwill with me by holding a departure after a slightly delayed inbound arrival, but this AA agent was stone cold... Most recently, on a CLT-TUS flight, I wasn't impressed with the FAs who didn't start their drink service until 40+ minutes into the flight, after multiple passengers went to the back of the plane to ask them for water while they had their shoes off and were chatting.

It's also sad to see the repeated management decisions to cheapen the brand. AA has a great set of hubs and could be a really fantastic airline if they put customers first.

I miss having DL as my main airline.

ckfred wrote:

Let me ask this question. What do the employees think of Doug Parker? Remember that the employees decided to back US's plan to buy AA, because they felt that Doug Parker had a better vision for the future of AA than did Tom Horton. I know a few pilots, and they also felt that a combined AA/US would have the scale to successfully compete with UA and DL.

One of the things that Parker said repeatedly during his townhalls before the purchase completed was that US's route system didn't generate the kind of premium traffic that AA had. So, US could not offer the superior product that AA offered. The combined carrier could continue to offer AA's product, because of premium routes like JFK-LAX, JFK-LHR, and LGA-ORD and the revenue they generate.

Do employees feel like Parker was less than honest with his vision for the combined carrier?

The expectation was to compete against DL and UA not F9 and NK. Management has said that they were going to place a focus on the 80% of the market that only flies once or twice a year. To do that, they needed to densify. They think they can keep the domestic premium traffic while attracting the ULCC traffic in the back and it's not working.

My company has us only flying AA if they're the only option. 27 former longtime Exec Plats are now spending a lot more flying DL and UA out of OKC, TUL, SEA, LAX, LGA/JFK and SFO.

SPREE34 wrote:

AA is what it's going to be for a long time to come. The culture has to change, and the opportunity to do that during the merger process was squandered. The needed culture change will take time as the old flushes out and new that can promote the change filter in. DP didn't cause this. He is but one factor in many. AA was like this before DP, US as well.

Sorry but you are wrong. AA was a good airline before Doug Parker and his US Air buddies took over.

Sancho99504 wrote:

ripcordd wrote:

Take care of your employees and they will go above and behind for the customer. AA employees took pay cuts from 2003 thru 2015 they were lied to and taken advantage of from CEOS Carty/Horton so much so they saw DP as the CEO with a cape on he promised the world and he has failed to live up to those promises all the while turning the Luxury Liner into the Grey Hound of the skies.. So employees feel cheated lied to and the greatness what AA once was going away this will cause some very unhappy employees.

What did Horton do other than taking AA into bankruptcy?

Carty screwed them deep and hard. Arpey was up front and honest with them, told them that this has to happen or bankruptcy is the only option. Arpey was forced out because he refused to take them into bankruptcy.

Horton approached the employee groups no different than Arpey, with a last ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy.

Deleting my reply since I mis-read your comment...


AA's issue is that it needs to have a clear vision and execute on that. You cannot be all airlines to all customers. Go for a premium experience or go for mass market appeal, but the shotgun approach isn't working.

tphuang wrote:

I think all this is overblown. I have had plenty of good experiences with aa crew and some underwhelming ones. They are just getting kicked now due to their financial performance.

I agree. You could have started this thread with ANY airline name, and it would bring forth the exact same types of bashing posts from people who already just don't like the particular carrier to begin with for whatever reason. C'est la vie

Until a couple years ago I flew at a regional that operated flights under the Delta, United, and American banners. It gave an interesting perspective into the cultures and operations of all three. There were three words I used when describing flying on the American side of our operation.

Motor
Vehicle
Department

Some employees were great, but there was a ton of indifference and CYA going on all over the place. Getting anything done took massive effort and persistence compared to DL or UA.

The new uniforms are a perfect microcosm of AA a couple years ago. They took a chance to excite their frontline employees and deliver something stylish and unique, and instead delivered a boring gray outfit that makes people itchy. Stale, corporate, and aggravating. I guess that’s three more words.