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Dear Mr. Bentel
I sent this to a VP at AA
I am a 30 year customer of US Airways and now American. I have accrued about 1.4 million miles on USA/AA. I have earned (under USA) Chairman multiple times but was generally Platinum. My flying has been reduced over the past few years so I'm now Gold.
I tell you all this as a preface to my comments. Over the years USA took a lot of criticism and I had my own occasional complaint but generally speaking I think they were a decent airline. Their upgrade policy was quite generous and with my past status I was usually upgraded and when I occasionally wanted to use upgrade miles I never had a problem.
I'm now sitting on over 456,000 miles and 26 upgrade certificates. I consider them both to be almost worthless. Only once in the last 18 months I have been able to use the upgrade certs. That is a by product of my Gold status. What do I even have them for? I have tried to use upgrade miles for my wife and I on numerous occasions and again only once was I able to do so. I usually make my res weeks in advance and when I do there are usually numerous seats available in 1st but mile upgrades apparently now can never be confirmed (at least for people like me) until the shortly before flight departure.
Another complaint, is we travel with our small dog. She has flown over 100 times on your planes. I pay $125 for this privilege to put her under a seat and on top of that you count her as a carry on. I should add that 99% of the time I get TSA approved and when my wife travels with me she usually does as well. Under USA I never had a problem getting my boarding pass in advance (on line the day before) but with the "new" AA you must get the BP at the airport. This is incredibly inconvenient as it prevents me from knowing if I'm getting TSA pre approved so I must arrive at the airport 2 hrs in advance or run the risk of not having enough time if I didn't get pre-approved that flight.
All of these things add up to causing me to ask the question; "why am I continuing to give all my business to one airline"? As a resident of the Phila area I'm more or less hostage to your company if I want multiple non stop options. But the alternatives are improving, especially with Alaska and Jet Blue adding more options.
Now that the industry has been allowed to consolidate as it has by the governemnt you folks are sitting in the cat bird's seat as they say. But what goes around comes around as they also say.
I usually don't spend my time writing companies and offering my opinion but I wanted you know that this customer has been made to feel by your practices that now that I'm just Gold I'm not that important anymore. And I want to add that Boarding Pass policy when traveling with a dog is awful.
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