On an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Tampa, a passenger sitting in first class says that a flight attendant spilled ed wine on them while serving the person seated ahead of them. She says the wine ran behind the seat into her $2,000 Louis Vuitton bag and damaged her socks, shoes, sweatpants, a laptop, Beats headphones, and a new Cartier ring box.
- The crewmember gate her paper napkins, and she got sent to customer service.
- She tried filing a claim with United but got passed around fom gate agent to baggage claim to telephone to web complaint forms. She filed multiple complaints and sent of an e-mail to the CEO.
- Her demand? $7,000 and a refund of her ticket.
Live and Let’s Fly flags that she posted the dispute to TikTok, tagging American, and included the flight attendant’s full name and employee number. She says the flight attendant gave those to her to try to be helpful with the incident.
Surely American should cover actual costs for damages they’ve caused, though they’d be properly entitled to some maximum limit. Passengers choosing to wear priceless artifacts, for instance, shouldn’t create unlimited liability that could bankrupt a company. Maybe they should add some miles, too.
But (1) it seems likely that the actual items aren’t totally ruined, (2) nor are they worth as much as she says they are (and she’s not likely entitled to more than depreciated value in any case). Clothes can be cleaned. So can Louis Vuitton bags. And she should go to Cartier to replace the ring box.
And while the flight attendant may have provided their information, that’s no excuse for publicly doxing them. As a general matter I post employee names when they put those out on social media themselves, or when they’re at the Managing Director level or above.
Now, American is clearly not being helpful and that’s not surprising. Getting real help from a big company can be challenging and this is one that’s cut back on their call centers. You do have plenty of avenues to escalate disputes with an airline (including a consumer complaint to the Department of Transportation, and small claims court). But your demands should appear on-face reasonable or the airline will garner more sympathy than you’d expect.
If this happens to you, you want documentation like photos and videos. You want to log names and seat numbers. And you should ask for an incident report to be written. Get items cleaned and that’s the cost you should be seeking if the cleaning works. And don’t post employee names and ID numbers.
United ruined a passenger’s laptop and offered 5,000 miles JetBlue offered a $25 voucher and a cheese plate after spilling coffee on a passenger’s laptop. So the going reimbursement rate appears to be very low.
@united offered 5000 miles for breaking my $1200 laptop in a toilet flood have not even gotten miles pic.twitter.com/Kj9cZhFcxf
— Baptize Machine Podcast (@BaptizeThe) October 10, 2024
An American Airlines flight attendant once was said to have ruined a passenger’s wedding dress by opening an overhead bin causing wine to spill on it.
It never became clear how opening the overhead bin caused wine to enter the woman’s carry on bag, or how her wedding was ruined by this – she’d already been married a year, had her nine-month old son with her, they’d just never done the celebration so I guess that could wait? They put off the celebration because of… law school. So the passengers thought they were a bit too clever by half?
It’s amazing the damage a spilled drink can do – a woman on Singapore Airlines claimed to have developed arthritis and diabetes because a flight attendant spilled a drink. Oh, wait. This is real.
- The drink spill her husband to “‘jerk’ into her” causing her to hit her leg against the metal footrest in front of her (Singapore long haul economy seats have foot bars).
- Hitting the foot rest caused a ‘soft tissue injury’ which led to “cellulitis… aggravation of rheumatoid arthritis; aggravation of type-one diabetes”
Singapore Airlines was actually sued, in part, for providing foot rests in economy. Although there was no Zapruder Film to help sort through what really happened there.
