Boy howdy of all the customer support I've had to deal with over the years, American Airlines has to be on the ass end of the bell curve. Let me ask you this; if you are a huge company with lots of employees, why must the ones who can't speak a lick of english be the ones you put on your help desk? Surely there are employees of American who's command of our nation's majority tongue is sufficient to communicate concepts such as credit transfers and refunds.
Check it out. So I cancelled my San Fran trip from last week and was told I'd now have a credit voucher, but American would rape me to the tune of 150 bucks for re-booking. Sucks, but whatever right? So I hop my merry ass onto Expedia (as I was told when I cancel the credits would "show up in my account" - they didn't) to book a flight to Boston in October for my cousin's wedding. Seeing that these credits were in fact, unavailable, I called the support and the automated menu even had a choice for those of us that needed to use a credit voucher. This is where the fun began. Oh dear jesus. This fucker (I can't remember his name, but it rhymed with spaghetti) couldn't even understand numbers. NUMBERS! I had to read my itinerary to him no less than 4 times. Then when we finally made it clear I was calling to use credit, he ran through the whole rigamarole on the 150 bucks over and over because I kept saying "Sure okay, so can you use the remaining part of the voucher for that or do I need to give you a credit card (the flight to Boston is like 300 and the San Fran flight was 4 something or other)." At one point he put me on hold for 7 minutes (I spent the time staring at my computer clock) listening to crackly-ass elevator music (note to people who create hold music -how about something soft? the only necessary function of hold music is to let us know we didn't get cut off). When he came back, he informed me that I in fact, had to do this whole transaction through American as Expedia would not be able to book the flight directly so Spaghetti would have to transfer me.
The American Airlines person was nice. All the way up until I told her I wanted to rebook. She asked me why on earth I'd want to do that since I would be charged 150 bucks (I'm given to assume that staying put in Chicago for the rest of my life seemed like a perfectly viable option to her). As if pissing away the entire cost of the SF flight was somehow advantageous to using whatever credit I could get towards Boston. What the fuck?? Once we got the motives of my flight out of the way, she then informed me that not only would I be charged the 150 bucks, but the remaining difference of the flights would also be lost. So that difference between the 300 bucks (or something like that) for the Boston flight and the 450 or so the SF flight cost...yeah that 150 bucks...that part was going to just go away or something. According to her, I couldn't use that towards a flight in the future. I was also told that it was "not American Airlines policy to apply a credit voucher towards the 150 dollar mandatory re-booking fee". Somehow this equates to good customer service (I know this because the message told me while I was being transferred that American Airlines was going to 'record this call for quality assurance'). I finally just piped up and said "So how is it that you guys are just going to charge me an extra 150 bucks for a flight I didnt' even fly, when I'm perfectly willing to apply it towards another flight at a later date?" (I have the Disney World Marathon in January so I was figuring I'd use it then). I was told "If it's that big of an issue, I can talk to a 'credit voucher specialist' and was transferred to this person who I had to explain the situation to THRICE until I was told that there was no problem whatsoever applying the 150 mandatory re-booking fee on my voucher. Somehow it worked out that with fees/taxes I owed them another 15 dollars for the Boston flight. I literally had to ask "Okay can I just give you a credit card for that?" half a dozen times until she finally said 'yes" (prior to 'yes', she engineered new and different ways to explain to me that the differences between the flights and the mandatory fee came to 15 dollars).
So after damn near two hours I FINALLY have a flight on American Airlines to Boston in October and American Airlines got their 150 bucks to switch my flight (150 bucks?!! really??? Why don't they just go ahead and call it a gas tax or something?). The situation was such a clusterfuck I decided to compose a Haiku in its honor:
AA Can Fuck Off
Shitty Phone Support Bitches
Will fly Delta Now