Next... American Airlines accused of "racism"

orange

orange

Line Up and Wait
Joined
Mar 23, 2014
Messages
807
Location
Pennsylvania
Display Name
Display name:
Orange
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/american-airlines-accused-racism-sending-085900013.html

Actually, I don't know what they seem to have done wrong. This story makes no sense (to me).

This woman (who has an AA Platinum Select/World Elite credit card) bought 2 tickets for her and a friend and decided to upgrade them to first class. (They have first class on a short domestic flight?) How did she upgrade them? The article doesn't say. I have never heard a credit card holder being upgraded automatically, much less a friend.

When they got their boarding passes, the friend got a first class seat, but she didn't. Right there, that doesn't sound right. She's the cardholder and they gave only the friend an upgrade? Any case, they accepted the boarding passes when they checked in and then made a big fuss on the plane trying to get the flight crew to re-assign the seats (NOT THEIR JOB!).

I love the misleading title "...sending black woman with first class ticket to back of plane". She didn't have a first class ticket, only her friend did. I think that's pretty clear. The back of the plane is called economy. Nothing offensive or demeaning about sitting in economy. We all do it.

And if a black person doesn't get their way, no matter how unreasonable the request, it's racism. And the flight crew didn't give her their undivided attention (they didn't keep constant eye contact with her), that's racism too. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Another attempt at a money grab and a bad one at that. No deal!
 
Someone that doesn't understand how the AA upgrade process works. In fact, very few do. And it's in the process of changing to prioritize dollars spent over the last 12 months, rolling, plus status and some other things.

Normally, they won't upgrade only one person on a 2 person itinerary (PNR) unless requested, so it might be that they were on different pnrs. It's also entirely possible that the airline changed equipment. Racism, I doubt. More likely internal to AA (and whomever the operating commuter carrier is as I don't believe AA has any mainline flights from LEX, SDF, or CVG to CLT.
 
I don't think it was a free upgrade. AA will offer seat upgrades, either to the preferred/exit rows or sometimes to First. I have paid for first class upgrades more than a few times prior to the flight. This is different than the "free" space-available upgrades given complementary to those with elite status.

I disagree with wsuffa. You can indeed upgrade one seat even if they are bought at the same time. That's how AA works.

The question is if she bought the upgrades, why wasn't her assigned seat available?

Of course, American has an absolutely abhorrant behavior of not refunding seat upgrades when they fail to deliver. Fortunately, Citibank honored my PROTEST of the charge for the seats not provided. United vouchered the amounts back to my card immediately when they failed to provide the paid for seats due to flight delays.
 
Sounds like another overly sensitive idiot who wants to blame a perceived injustice on race when it was likely no more than an honest mistake or simple misunderstanding. Many people are simply spring-loaded to the pizzed-off position.
 
It may be incompetence other than outward hostility, but it's still horrendous customer service and indicative of the problem with the big air carriers these days.
 
AA sells discounted F class seats in A class.

"A" class is really a coach seat with an automatic first class upgrade [domestically].

If they take a 757 and sub a 737 - there are 16 F class seats instead of 24 - 8 people have to go. Which 8 are they?

I have personally been downgraded when they shifted from a A321 to an A320. It happens. But I contacted AA and told them I insisted on a credit voucher for the difference in fare between A and the lowest fare I could have bought that day. How did I know ? Because I had a screen shot that I take of EVERY A class upgrade ticket I buy to prove what the fare could have been. While AA did not voluntarily provide me the credit - once I asked - and proved it - I got it.

A downgrade depends on many factors - including status, date of purchase, prior flights on AA in the last 30 days, and if you've ever worn a hat on AA before. I am a platinum lifetime flier but sometimes divert to Comanche Air which limits my recent 30 day prior record of flying AA>

I'm pretty sure they have no idea what a person's race is from their ticket record. Unless their name is Shaniqua. But thats wrong.

Yet another sad effort at claiming racism.
 
flyingron said:
The question is if she bought the upgrades, why wasn't her assigned seat available?
Click to expand...

Because they changed aircraft from the day that they sold the ticket - depending how far out that happened - maybe they could contact her - maybe they changed gauge that morning -
 
"Baldwin - an AAdvantage Platinum Select/World Elite cardholder - had purchased the two tickets and decided to upgrade them both to first class. However, when they were issued their boarding passes, she was instructed to go to the back of the plane despite her frequent flyer status, while Novack, who holds no status with the airline, was directed to first class. Baldwin was told her seat had been reassigned because there weren’t enough first class seats available."

From this article, it's confusing as to what they mean by "was instructed to go to the back of the plane..." Instructed by whom? I think they mean that they were issued different class boarding passes. Why did she not make a stink at check-in if her boarding pass was wrong?
 
Another article makes a little more sense.

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2017/...after-downgrading-woman-from-first-class.html

Two things stand out.

This is "the worst racism this woman has encountered her whole life". If that's true, she should be thankful because this was not racism. Ask other Blacks about racism they have seen and they would laugh at this.

Later, when a FA said that they could spread out to be more comfortable, they also took that as racist. (HOW?????)
 
Some people just suck and can't wrap their head around the fact that their problem isn't their skin or what in their pants, it's them.

A woman pilot I knew, everytime something didn't go her way it was because she was a woman, or if anyone didn't want to work with her, it's because they had a problem with women, all said it wasn't as much that she was a she, it was that she was a bioatch.

There are racists bigots and sexists, however I'm my experience white actually tend to care the least one way or another about race, and overall the people that do honestly care are a crumbling tiny minority.
 
James331 said:
Some people just suck and can't wrap their head around the fact that their problem isn't their skin or what in their pants, it's them.

A woman pilot I knew, everytime something didn't go her way it was because she was a woman, or if anyone didn't want to work with her, it's because they had a problem with women, all said it wasn't as much that she was a she, it was that she was a bioatch.

There are racists bigots and sexists, however I'm my experience white actually tend to care the least one way or another about race, and overall the people that do honestly care are a crumbling tiny minority.
Click to expand...


I think I worked with her......

I knew a woman like that in Alaska. She finally took care of the problem by dumping a plane into the Arctic Ocean.
 
James331 said:
Some people just suck and can't wrap their head around the fact that their problem isn't their skin or what in their pants, it's them.

A woman pilot I knew, everytime something didn't go her way it was because she was a woman, or if anyone didn't want to work with her, it's because they had a problem with women, all said it wasn't as much that she was a she, it was that she was a bioatch.

There are racists bigots and sexists, however I'm my experience white actually tend to care the least one way or another about race, and overall the people that do honestly care are a crumbling tiny minority.
Click to expand...
I worked with a captain that was the same way. He failed upgrade twice because he was a victim of racism. All the white check airmen hated black people. Every failure in his life was because of white racism against black people. He was still a high mins captain when I was on a 4 day with the guy. He was lazy. It was obvious why he had training issues and what he looked like had no impact.

We ended up getting along fine. Mainly at bars on overnights because then he was generally quiet about all the social injustices in his life and no matter how stupid he was being it didn't endanger anyone's life.

We had many conversations about his ideas on racism. I learned a lot from Chris.

- All white people are racist. Even when they think they are not racist. He informed me I was racist because of my white skin color.
-All black people are victims of racism and should have a leg up in life
-it was impossible for black people to be racist because the stereotype of white racism was a fact not a prejudice.

It was an eye opening relationship for me. I'm from the south and had friends from all over the world living in my community. They were just my friends. I didn't see ethnicity or race as a defining quality in someone's character or morals. Now if you're in a crowded room trying to find someone it helps to know how they look.

Chris used a class in cultural studies he took in college as validation of his position. I figured he was just making **** up because he was really that lazy. But who knows. I dropped out of college to go fly stuff. I sure hope he was never exposed to that line of thinking at university.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
Actually seems like people should make different travel choices. And less regulation.
Click to expand...
What I'm getting at is that people want airline flying to be like it was when it was regulated but they don't want the prices to go up either. In the history of deregulation nobody's yet survived trying to make that work.
 
Art VanDelay said:
What I'm getting at is that people want airline flying to be like it was when it was regulated but they don't want the prices to go up either. In the history of deregulation nobody's yet survived trying to make that work.
Click to expand...
Oohhh. Yeah. That's like finding a unicorn. It's a simple matrix. We get what we pay for in business.

I agree totally
 
Art VanDelay said:
What I'm getting at is that people want airline flying to be like it was when it was regulated but they don't want the prices to go up either. In the history of deregulation nobody's yet survived trying to make that work.
Click to expand...

I'm SOOO with you on this. You want to fly with me, pay out the ass. If you want cheap Go Greyhound or Amtrak.

This is another example where making a thing "affordable for everyone" makes it "unbearable for everyone."
 
I don't think "regulation" has anything to do with it. The problem is an absolutely abhorrent corporate culture and the corresponding backlash from the customers. Despite the recent public relations nightmare, hardly anything has changed with any of the mainline carriers with regard to their treatment of the paying customer like cattle. The feeling is that anything other than indifference requires an additional surcharge, and even then they are typically belligerent.

I have never understood the outright belligerence at both AA and UA when THEY screw up. They should bend over backward to fix things. The problem is that they don't treat their customer-facing personnel any better than they treat the customers. Bad attitudes all the way around.
 
flyingron said:
I don't think "regulation" has anything to do with it. The problem is an absolutely abhorrent corporate culture and the corresponding backlash from the customers. Despite the recent public relations nightmare, hardly anything has changed with any of the mainline carriers with regard to their treatment of the paying customer like cattle. The feeling is that anything other than indifference requires an additional surcharge, and even then they are typically belligerent.

I have never understood the outright belligerence at both AA and UA when THEY screw up. They should bend over backward to fix things. The problem is that they don't treat their customer-facing personnel any better than they treat the customers. Bad attitudes all the way around.
Click to expand...
The airlines carried 928.6 million people last year. With these 6ish isolated incidents of bad PR, I think they're doing a pretty good job. There are definitely people who shouldn't be in customer and service and need to work on things for sure though. It's also an eye opener to the public that have an entitled attitude and think they can get away with anything because they are the customer.
 
Sixish highly publicized incidents, but about every air traveler who flies more than a couple of times a year has his own nightmares to report. Let's see just last year I had:

1. Bag lost. It took almost an hour to find someone at the terminal to even take my complaint (and I wasn't alone). It took two days and it was near impossible to get a status update. Furhter, since I was staying more than an hour's drive from the destination airport rather than just FEDEXing it from Denver (where the bag ended up having not gotten unloaded at the DFW connection), they waited a whole day to ship it back to DFW, on to my destination airport and then Fedexed it. I was without other than the single change of clothes in my carry on for 40% of my trip.

2. Maintenance foul up. Plane diverted from an outlying airport (SNA) to LAX. Rather than dispatching a replacement immediately, they putzed around hoping to repair the first plane. Of course, this took hours. Now we've got a full A300 of people to rebook and two gate agents. I managed to get up to the podium early, but most everybody else got screwed. This should have been an all hands by the airline personnel to get people to call customer service to rebook and then experss the pass printing. I watched this royal screwup from the bar while waiting for my flight.

3. Failure to deliver paid for seat upgrades (wasn't first, but I got bumped out of the exit row I paid for as a result of the above). Airline kept saying, yeah, yeah, we'll refund you eventually. Finally, contested the charge with the credit card company.

4. Have the branded credit cards with a couple of airlines. One regularly fails to deliver the paid-for amenities without a fuss: checked bag, boarding priority on pass.

5. A lot of equipment downgrades seem to be largely "discretionary." Again, reassignment largely a mess.

6. Upgraded a morbidly obese person who exuded into my E+ seat. As an "elite" he gets the upgrade for free, but I have to deal with his assualt for an extra $52 or whatever.

7. Got trapped on the "airside" of security with a flight that clearly wasn't going to make the connection and there was NOBODY from my airline there to deal with it. Finally dug around in one of the abandonned podiums and found a extension number for the ticket counter to press the issue.
 
flyingron said:
I don't think "regulation" has anything to do with it. The problem is an absolutely abhorrent corporate culture and the corresponding backlash from the customers. Despite the recent public relations nightmare, hardly anything has changed with any of the mainline carriers with regard to their treatment of the paying customer like cattle. The feeling is that anything other than indifference requires an additional surcharge, and even then they are typically belligerent.

I have never understood the outright belligerence at both AA and UA when THEY screw up. They should bend over backward to fix things. The problem is that they don't treat their customer-facing personnel any better than they treat the customers. Bad attitudes all the way around.
Click to expand...

That's because they have to make a profit now - "Bend over backwards" sounds nice unfortunately it costs money too. Now, do the people at the very top get paid too much ? Absolutely. But that disparity is in NO way limited to the airline industry - it's everywhere.

Anymore when people sense ANY form of transgression they immediately expect something free. Well that's nice but pretty hard to do with razor thin margins.
 
flyingron said:
Sixish highly publicized incidents, but about every air traveler who flies more than a couple of times a year has his own nightmares to report. Let's see just last year I had:

1. Bag lost. It took almost an hour to find someone at the terminal to even take my complaint (and I wasn't alone). It took two days and it was near impossible to get a status update. Furhter, since I was staying more than an hour's drive from the destination airport rather than just FEDEXing it from Denver (where the bag ended up having not gotten unloaded at the DFW connection), they waited a whole day to ship it back to DFW, on to my destination airport and then Fedexed it. I was without other than the single change of clothes in my carry on for 40% of my trip.

2. Maintenance foul up. Plane diverted from an outlying airport (SNA) to LAX. Rather than dispatching a replacement immediately, they putzed around hoping to repair the first plane. Of course, this took hours. Now we've got a full A300 of people to rebook and two gate agents. I managed to get up to the podium early, but most everybody else got screwed. This should have been an all hands by the airline personnel to get people to call customer service to rebook and then experss the pass printing. I watched this royal screwup from the bar while waiting for my flight.

3. Failure to deliver paid for seat upgrades (wasn't first, but I got bumped out of the exit row I paid for as a result of the above). Airline kept saying, yeah, yeah, we'll refund you eventually. Finally, contested the charge with the credit card company.

4. Have the branded credit cards with a couple of airlines. One regularly fails to deliver the paid-for amenities without a fuss: checked bag, boarding priority on pass.

5. A lot of equipment downgrades seem to be largely "discretionary." Again, reassignment largely a mess.

6. Upgraded a morbidly obese person who exuded into my E+ seat. As an "elite" he gets the upgrade for free, but I have to deal with his assualt for an extra $52 or whatever.

7. Got trapped on the "airside" of security with a flight that clearly wasn't going to make the connection and there was NOBODY from my airline there to deal with it. Finally dug around in one of the abandonned podiums and found a extension number for the ticket counter to press the issue.
Click to expand...
For sure and all those things suck but I think people have to put things into perspective. You're travel in a metal tube going 600mph. You can get from one end of the country to the other in 5 hours. Louis CK nails it. Totally not downplaying your issues but I think a lot if a lot of people just take a step back and breathe, it's really not too bad. Did you get to your destination eventually? Did you make it there alive? Skip to about 2:00

 
flyingron said:
Sixish highly publicized incidents, but about every air traveler who flies more than a couple of times a year has his own nightmares to report. Let's see just last year I had:

1. Bag lost. It took almost an hour to find someone at the terminal to even take my complaint (and I wasn't alone). It took two days and it was near impossible to get a status update. Furhter, since I was staying more than an hour's drive from the destination airport rather than just FEDEXing it from Denver (where the bag ended up having not gotten unloaded at the DFW connection), they waited a whole day to ship it back to DFW, on to my destination airport and then Fedexed it. I was without other than the single change of clothes in my carry on for 40% of my trip.

2. Maintenance foul up. Plane diverted from an outlying airport (SNA) to LAX. Rather than dispatching a replacement immediately, they putzed around hoping to repair the first plane. Of course, this took hours. Now we've got a full A300 of people to rebook and two gate agents. I managed to get up to the podium early, but most everybody else got screwed. This should have been an all hands by the airline personnel to get people to call customer service to rebook and then experss the pass printing. I watched this royal screwup from the bar while waiting for my flight.

3. Failure to deliver paid for seat upgrades (wasn't first, but I got bumped out of the exit row I paid for as a result of the above). Airline kept saying, yeah, yeah, we'll refund you eventually. Finally, contested the charge with the credit card company.

4. Have the branded credit cards with a couple of airlines. One regularly fails to deliver the paid-for amenities without a fuss: checked bag, boarding priority on pass.

5. A lot of equipment downgrades seem to be largely "discretionary." Again, reassignment largely a mess.

6. Upgraded a morbidly obese person who exuded into my E+ seat. As an "elite" he gets the upgrade for free, but I have to deal with his assualt for an extra $52 or whatever.

7. Got trapped on the "airside" of security with a flight that clearly wasn't going to make the connection and there was NOBODY from my airline there to deal with it. Finally dug around in one of the abandonned podiums and found a extension number for the ticket counter to press the issue.
Click to expand...

On point number 2 - you think the airlines can actually afford to just kept spare planes idly standing by as spares ? Sure would be nice but it just ain't gonna happen with the current business model they're given.

Point 4 - Is that an airline issue or a credit card (bank) issue ?

Point 5 - How are you supposed to make any money with half full 757 versus a full EMB175 ? Yeah that half empty 757 would be a lot more comfortable but it's back to profits once again.

Point 6 - so now you want them to discriminate against obese people ? That would be real popular in this current climate wouldn't it ?

Point 7 - It sure would be nice if airlines could afford to have extra staff just standing around at podiums or roaming around but they tend to keep staffing levels at the minimum amount in order to make any money.

You see Ronnie it seems that just about all of your ills could be simply fixed - if making money weren't important.
 
flyingron said:
I don't think "regulation" has anything to do with it. The problem is an absolutely abhorrent corporate culture and the corresponding backlash from the customers. Despite the recent public relations nightmare, hardly anything has changed with any of the mainline carriers with regard to their treatment of the paying customer like cattle. The feeling is that anything other than indifference requires an additional surcharge, and even then they are typically belligerent.

I have never understood the outright belligerence at both AA and UA when THEY screw up. They should bend over backward to fix things. The problem is that they don't treat their customer-facing personnel any better than they treat the customers. Bad attitudes all the way around.
Click to expand...
They don't because they don't have to.

AA has gotten materially worse since the merger with USAirway, which still harbors attitudes from Allegheny (and has internal employee groups that don't see eye to eye). UA has been a mess for a long time, but I stopped flying them 20+ years ago when I personally had very bad treatment from them.

Delta has done a lot better, though it's not always been that way (the "so be it" days).

The big airlines - in particular UA and AA - have learned how to use regulation to their benefit so they don't have to change. There is no real consumer benefit to much of the regulation, and the arguments made in merger proceedings about "consumer benefit" focus on "we'll serve more markets with seamless connections to the rest of the system" as opposed to better customer service, lower prices, etc. We see it today with the fight against the Middle East airlines that provide superior service (and there's plenty of scuttlebutt that the current laptop ban focused on the middle east is intended to hurt those airlines and not the US carriers... there's much more of a fight against the expansion of the ban than there was about putting in on the ME hubs).

Even the cable companies are working to get better at service, driven in part by the competition from streaming. Until the traveling public demands more and gets over the "Southwest is for lower classes" attitude, the problem will persist. Social media will help. And frankly, from some of the customer attitudes I've seen over the years the big, bad airlines and some of the customers deserve each other.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
<snip> Chris used a class in cultural studies he took in college as validation of his position. I figured he was just making **** up because he was really that lazy. But who knows. I dropped out of college to go fly stuff. I sure hope he was never exposed to that line of thinking at university.
Click to expand...

Sadly, most universities really do teach this stuff. Many actually require it. What Chris was saying is right there in the mandatory training sessions at University of Delaware: "“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

Source: https://www.thefire.org/university-of-delaware-requires-students-to-undergo-ideological-reeducation/
 
starglider said:
Sadly, most universities really do teach this stuff. Many actually require it. What Chris was saying is right there in the mandatory training sessions at University of Delaware: "“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

Source: https://www.thefire.org/university-of-delaware-requires-students-to-undergo-ideological-reeducation/
Click to expand...

It didn't last long, but it happened:

http://www1.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/nov/letter110107.html

http://www1.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/nov/senate110607.html
 
Reminds me of the phrase: "To a kid with a hammer, everything's a nail."
 
AA and USAir were no bargain before the merger, much as with Continental and UA.
 
James331 said:
Some people just suck and can't wrap their head around the fact that their problem isn't their skin or what in their pants, it's them.

A woman pilot I knew, everytime something didn't go her way it was because she was a woman, or if anyone didn't want to work with her, it's because they had a problem with women, all said it wasn't as much that she was a she, it was that she was a bioatch.

There are racists bigots and sexists, however I'm my experience white actually tend to care the least one way or another about race, and overall the people that do honestly care are a crumbling tiny minority.
Click to expand...

It's possible to be a member of a minority group and also have a repulsive personality nobody wants to work with. But these types will always blame anyone but themselves.
 
Rushie said:
It's possible to be a member of a minority group and also have a repulsive personality nobody wants to work with. But these types will always blame anyone but themselves.
Click to expand...

Everybody is in a minority group these days, if they want to be.
 
The problem with cheap airfare is it attracts cheap pax, some folks were never meant to grace a airfoil.
 
flyingron said:
AA and USAir were no bargain before the merger, much as with Continental and UA.
Click to expand...
Concur, but now it's like the worst of both.

At least CO had some semblance of service before the merger (IME), but it got assimilated into the borg.
 
starglider said:
Sadly, most universities really do teach this stuff. Many actually require it. What Chris was saying is right there in the mandatory training sessions at University of Delaware: "“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."
Click to expand...

A lot of this has to do with terminology. Educational institutions use the word completely differently than most people on the street. What people think as 'racism', would be described by academia as 'bigotry'. And what academia describe as 'racism', doesn't have anything to do with day-to-day interactions of white and black people.

e.g. From here - this is how I've heard the terms used in academic context:

"Prejudice is when a person negatively pre-judges another person or group without getting to know the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings behind their words and actions. A person of any racial group can be prejudiced towards a person of any other racial group. There is no power dynamic involved.

Bigotry is stronger than prejudice, a more severe mindset and often accompanied by discriminatory behavior. It’s arrogant and mean-spirited, but requires neither systems nor power to engage in.

Racism is the system that allows the racial group that’s already in power to retain power. Since arriving on U.S. soil white people have used their power to create preferential access to survival resources (housing, education, jobs, food, health, legal protection, etc.) for white people while simultaneously impeding people of color’s access to these same resources. Though "reverse racism" is a term I sometimes hear, it has never existed in America. White people are the only racial group to have ever established and retained power in the United States."


Based on this, racism is something completely different than this American Airlines encounter and what most people (black and white alike) think of as "racism". So, if you want to be academically correct, even if you agreed with the complaint, it should be called bigotry. It's wrong to say this is racism.

But it probably wasn't bigotry either.
 
jordane93 said:
For sure and all those things suck but I think people have to put things into perspective. You're travel in a metal tube going 600mph. You can get from one end of the country to the other in 5 hours. Louis CK nails it. Totally not downplaying your issues but I think a lot if a lot of people just take a step back and breathe, it's really not too bad. Did you get to your destination eventually? Did you make it there alive? Skip to about 2:00

Click to expand...

One of my favorite all time bits. But the entire thing starts about 1:30.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top