American's app made me nearly miss a flight and then miss a flight. The people that work there said it's because I'm not refreshing it, but that's not the issue. It literally had a big orange block at the top that said you need to schedule a new flight because it's been canceled. When I went to talk to the folks at American to schedule a new flight the first thing they did was start looking for flights. It wasn't until they tried to schedule me for the flight that I had originally booked that we realized that it was NOT CANCELLED! But here's why I almost missed my flight... they only saw that after I asked him if there was an earlier flight than The very late one they were trying to put me on. If I hadn't asked that, they wouldn't have realized there was a flight leaving in the next half an hour, then I had been told was canceled by the app. I have an image of the app later on still with the orange blocking seeing it's canceled and a green block that says on time. WTF!! This was all on my way to my destination of Milwaukee Wisconsin.
On my way back to Portland Oregon, everything was on time and I went to the appropriate gate of B6. I kept periodically checking my boarding pass to make sure it said B6. At the B6 gate they never announced the destination, but they started boarding after a 20 minute delay due to cleaners. When they said they were boarding group eight I got up to get in line and realized that the board said Phoenix. At that point I looked at my ticket and had updated to B12. I had looked at it just 10 minutes earlier and it said gate B6. I ran to gate B12 which is only about a 2 minute run and it was too late. The flight was off and now I had to wait three more hours to get on a different flight. That was frustrating, but more frustrating was that the desk folks were just plain rude. They said that it was my fault and that I should have been refreshing my app and looking at the board. I have no idea when they change the gate, but it must have been a short period of time. I'm not the only one that missed the flight. There were two other people standing there with me who missed the flight due to the gate change. When I mentioned to this to the folks at the desks, they said "well there were 170 people who didn't miss it." That's fine.. but it doesn't mean they're not rude or providing bad service. It doesn't mean that the app suddenly worked when it wasn't working appropriately for me.
In addition to these difficulties with communication, the flights themselves were terrible. The seats were cramped and the flights were very turbulent. I've never gotten motion sickness on a flight in 30 years of flying but on both my flight out and my return flights I got motion sickness on two separate legs. I asked my seat mates on both of those flights what they thought... Was this a little turbulence a lot of turbulence or par for the course based on their experience. On both flights the other people said they thought it was a lot of turbulence, they said it was more than they're used to experiencing.
I always fly Alaska, but I had to book American because of the last minute flight. It was incredibly expensive, full of poor communication, and costly to me in terms of time. I will never fly with American again.