Compensation for a Cancelled Flight (And I’ve Moved Halfway Across the Country)

I’m Living in Austin!

Instead of traveling to Austin at least once a month, I’m now traveling to DC at least once a month.

I haven’t changed jobs, I’ve only changed a bit of my area of focus and where I’m working from.

I lived in the Washington DC area for the past 18 years, so it’s certainly strange to become a Texan (trading in my Virginia drivers license, anyway).

Austin’s absolutely fantastic, in some ways of think of it as San Francisco in the middle of Texas. And the food — not just barbecue — is uniformly great. The concerts here are non-stop. I’ll miss the bulk of South By this month though, working from DC.

Sunday’s Flight Home from DFW Was Cancelled

I was flying Emirates first class (trip report forthcoming) Colombo, Sri Lanka – Dubai – Dallas. The Emirates first class lounge that’s an entire level of the A concourse is the most bizarre lounge I’ve been in. But my “Night of the Comet” experience there is a story for another day.

My flight arrived Sunday morning, and I was connecting on a separate ticket from Dallas to Austin on American.

The Austin flight was cancelled as part of the aftermath of the weather issues plaguing DFW airport last week. No other Austin flights were available on Sunday — or on Monday.

I got an email from American while I was on my Emirates flight, “sorry we couldn’t reschedule you” or words to that effect.

It turns out there weren’t any Southwest flights available out of Love Field that day either (except for the 8am flight, departing an hour before I would land at DFW).

I booked a rental car to drive home, but didn’t really want to drive after traveling for more than a day. And I didn’t want to transfer to the Love Field Doubletree to catch the bus either. I just wanted to be home.

I booked a car through Groundlink (as a ‘guest’ rather than logged in, so that a 20% off coupon code would ‘take’). Minutes later I got an email saying as a new customer they’d need a scan of my drivers license and credit card to dispatch a car. Wasn’t going to happen inflight, but I gave them the email address of an account I had set up long ago. They said the security measures were because I was a new account, I assumed it was because they didn’t want to do the ride on the cheap. But once I identified my account, they re-instated the ~ $400 booking.

Compensation from American

I submitted a refund request for my wife’s flight and my own. That was going to cover half the cost of the car.

Then I emailed AAdvantage customer service for each of us.

• Asking for ‘original routing credit’ for the 500 elite qualifying miles and 1000 redeemable miles I would have earned on the flight.
  
• And unspecified ‘additional miles’ for the inconvenience.

I sent the exact same note to AAdvantage customer service for each. Two days later we each got calls from American confirming that the flight would be credited and we’d each get miles.

Interestingly she got 12,500 miles… and I got 15,000.

So net net I consider us ‘ahead’ for the cancellation. We even got home about 45 minutes earlier than if we our flight hadn’t been cancelled.

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