Broken Seats, Broken Armrests And Out Of Order Tray Tables — American Airlines Calls It ‘Product Delivered’


Airlines market a premium experience. They want you to spend more money than the basic fare. Delta, United and American all work hard to generate a revenue premium, and increasingly passengers are looking for more than the basic transportation that Spirit Airlines and Frontier have offered. Frontier is even adding first class seats, and Southwest is expected to as well!

But what happens when they don’t deliver what they promise? American Airlines says that even their coach ticket “is more than just a seat.” It “includes everything you need for an enjoyable flight.” Sometimes, they don’t even give you the actual seat.

And how often have I written about the ‘basket of deplorables’ Airbus A320 fleet that’s a legacy of both US Airways and America West?

Customers are promised – at a minimum – safe, clean and comfortable transportation. But then the safe or clean part isn’t delivered, the airline promised they never offered those. Their contract of carriage disavows responsibility for anything beyond moving you from A to B.

And the Airline Deregulation Act has been read by the Supreme Court to preempt common law torts – you can’t make arguments about a ‘covenant of good faith and fair dealing’ because those are considered state law claims, and federal law trumps those.

The customer who shared the arm rest photo above wrote to American Airlines, and American responded that “we don’t offer compensation for this situation.” They consider their product fully delivered. Put another way, for all the marketing spin about premium, this is what they believe their actual product is.

And here’s a customer who complained about a broken first class tray table – there was an ‘out of order’ sticker on it and they could not use it to eat, so they didn’t get their first class meal. American’s response was: “you won’t get a partial refund.”

American feels they fully delivered the purchased first class service, even though they advertise a “premium” experience with “premium dining” that this customer could not have. You got what you deserve.

In perhaps the most extreme example of this I’ve seen, a mother bought her infant a paid seat on American Airlines, but the airline reassigned that seat to another passenger and required the child to fly as a lap infant instead. When she sought a refund for the unused paid seat, American refused on the theory that the “child flew,” so no refund was due.

American is not alone in this. A hill I will die on is that when an airline fails to deliver the product that they market to customers then they have not earned the fare, and the customer is due something back. The Department of Transportation doesn’t enforce this, and airlines were granted a liability shield. That gives them a federal license to steal, and it shouldn’t be this way.

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Broken Seats, Broken Armrests And Out Of Order Tray Tables — American Airlines Calls It ‘Product Delivered’
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Igor Jeuhan