My friend, when reading the story (linked to in above paragraph) of how I got AA to find my daughter's lost luggage PRONTO, commented that I sure was one "can-do broad". I liked that. I decided it was time to bring out the "can-do broad" in me once again.
I start searching online for the name of someone in authority in either sales or customer relations at Allianz in the Ontario office. It takes a long time, like well over an hour. It is information that is really buried but I end up finding a woman on Linked In who is the head of Customer Service in Ontario. I can't see any contact information for her as she is not connected to me in any way and there is only a first name and a last initial. So I Google her name with the initial and ALLIANZ, and I find a link back to Linked In with her whole name. I still can't see any contact info but... the personal email of the agent I have been talking to was his first name - dot - his last name and then @alianz-assistance.ca I had seen online another person's email at the company and it was his first and last name with the same ending so I start an email to her and type in her name etc and hope it works. I detail everything that has occurred to this point, ask her to intervene for a resolution, and hit send. Heading off to bed (at close to 4am) I hope I wake to good news.
I do... it worked!!!! And she has replied to say she has some people looking into it. Actually what I wake to is a phone call from Shawn, the agent, to say that they are going to refund me the money. THEN I go check my email and see she wrote to me three hours ago (time difference) to say that she has some people looking into it. WOW. So it worked. Go to the top and you get speedy results. I am ecstatic.
That done, it is now time to select some seats with more leg room on the longer legs of my flights to and from the Dominican Republic. I pull up my flight itinerary on American Airlines website and... hellooo... what is this now? My flights home have changed. Now instead of Miami to LA then home, I fly from Miami to Dallas. Excuse me? Especially seeing how this means I fly out of Miami two hours earlier than the previous plan, did no one think this might be information important for me to have?
So I call AA. The woman on the other end tells me that it is the responsibility of the sales company - in this case Flight Hub - to let me know. AA sends an alert of changes to the company I bought tickets from and they then are to contact me and alert me. I know she is telling me the truth because that is how it has always worked. That is how it worked on the flights I had to cancel already (because the changes did not work for me). As it happens, these changes I can live with - I no longer have a long lay over waiting for the flight to Vancouver so I am getting in four hours earlier. But that is not the point. She is rather surprised that I have not received notification and so takes all my information so that if there are any more changes, they can contact me directly.
I then call Flight Hub, ready to tear a strip off of them as the changes were made over TWO WEEKS ago. Again, had I not wanted to upgrade my seats, I would have had NO idea that this had occurred.
The woman on the other end tells me they never got the alert from AA, thus they had no idea the flights had changed.
Sigh. Typical blame game... NO ONE is responsible. Right.
Whatever. I now have my new itinerary printed out. I will be checking AA's site daily to see if there are any more changes as I don't trust anyone now.
Yesterday I purchased additional travel insurance through my union's provider to pad out what I already had with them.
I don't have trip cancellation insurance now, which I thought I had before. I also don't have baggage loss insurance... just what I get with the credit card for charging the trip with them.
It is astounding to me how much incompetence there is everywhere. Astounding.
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