Reader Email: Four (4) AA SWUs expire while on hold for over 10 hours; AA says “tough luck”

A LoyaltyLobby reader sent us an email about an annoying experience of getting through to the American Airlines Executive Platinum desk on Sunday to apply SWUs that were about to expire.

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You can access AA here.

Email from the reader:

Got screwed by AA yesterday and thought you might be interested. Curious how many other people were screwed similarly.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in having four (4) AA SWUs expiring 7/31. With travel such a disaster right now and with SWU availability extremely limited, I had held off on using them in the hopes that AA would extend them, like United.

Yesterday being deadline day, I booked two trips with SWU availability and then called in to have the SWUs applied, which is supposed to be a quick process. I expected I might be on hold for an hour or two but was shocked to hear “the current wait time is approximately 8 hours.”

Over ten (10) hours later, as midnight approached in New York, I still hadn’t gotten through to, or heard back from, anyone at AA by phone. (I first requested a callback, and then called back and remained on hold.)

Many hours into my phone wait, I opened a chat at AA.com. After a long  wait, a rep told me that “the department that handles SWUs isn’t open on Saturday or Sunday,” which, obviously, is nonsense. An hour or two later, I was connected to a different chat rep who miraculously appeared ready to process the upgrades, but then came back and told me my SWUs had just disappeared from my account and that “there’s no way to reinstate them.” (It was only around 1:30 AM Eastern, so AA didn’t waste any time deleting them from accounts.)

I’ve had an AAdvantage account for 30 years but suspect I might have taken my last flight on AA … not that anyone at AA will care.

Conclusion

Would you think that in 2022 airlines would allow members to use upgrade vouchers online rather than calling them in?

I experienced a rather long wait time to get through to the AA EXP desk earlier this year when I took the video above that I uploaded to YouTube.

I am sure some readers say why they didn’t try to use them earlier. However, as the reader above points out, it wasn’t out of possibility that they would be further extended due to the chaos taking place at airports.

The service from the airlines has definitely deteriorated from what it used to be, and now we are also dealing with inexperienced agents when those who had worked for the airlines forever were laid off or took packages to leave during the pandemic travel slump.

Unfortunately, American is not showing any flexibility in the reader’s case.