Flight Cancellation For Medical Reasons: American Airlines Exceeded My Expectations
For a flight cancellation for medical reasons, I thought the process would be annoying. American Airlines charges $150 to cancel an award ticket and redeposit the miles into your account. But what do they do on a flight cancellation for medical reasons? I assumed common sense would apply, but they really impressed me with their customer service in this situation. You’ll understand why I’m still in shock.
The Booking
As a surprise Christmas gift / birthday gift, we booked tickets to Florida to take my mother-in-law to Disney World for the first time. I mentioned previously that we were staying at the DoubleTree Suites near Disney Village and also how we’d saved money/stacked points during the trip planning. This trip was for a week in January. I used 30,000 AA miles for an economy round-trip ticket to Miami via Brasilia. Everything seemed great.
Flight Cancellation For Medical Reasons
2 days before the flight, my mother-in-law had unbearable pain and bad swelling in her leg/foot. A relative saw it and took her to the emergency room at the hospital. She was diagnosed with thrombosis and told not to fly under any circumstances–for a minimum of 6 months. That killed the Florida trip for her.
She immediately notified my wife that she couldn’t come to Florida (we were already there visiting my parents). I immediately called AA and asked about my options. They said that, without elite status, I would have to pay the standard cancellation fee of $150 to get my miles back. The phone rep directed me to email asking for reimbursement because of the circumstances.
The ticket was technically still valid until September (since I’d booked it last September), but it needed to be the same passenger plus same start/end points to avoid change fees. With a minimum 6 months’ ban on flying, we didn’t see using the ticket in that time as realistic and went forward with the cancel / pay / hope for reimbursement plan.
AA Surprises Me
After returning home and gathering documents with the name of the hospital, date & time, doctor’s name, etc. to have better information to provide to American Airlines in my email, I finally emailed them this week. I gave a description of what happened, the doctor’s / hospital’s contact info, and reiterated that she was expressly told not to fly. This wasn’t just choosing not to fly, so I hoped my cancellation fee would be refunded.
Less than 5 hours later, a customer service rep from AA called me. They wanted to confirm that I’d already received my points refund and wanted to make sure I’d seen that. They also wanted to know which credit card I’d used to pay the cancellation fee, so they could refund it to me. The next morning, my American Express card already showed the $150 fee refund coming in.
I expected a mountain of headaches in this process. The booking was from my account/miles but for a different passenger. That passenger lives in Brazil but the trip is to the U.S. I was asking American Airlines to verify information from a hospital outside their home country/territory. The chances of delays and headaches were pretty big. Instead, American Airlines really amazed me by making everything simple. They’d read my email and wanted to make things smooth. This is customer service.
Final Thoughts
The bad incidents often get the most attention. Yeah, American Airlines has a lot of customer service issues. You can watch video after video on YouTube of people arguing with their gate agents or check-in staff. I’ve talked about my fare share of issues with airlines. In this instance, I expected headaches. Instead, AA pleasantly surprised me with how they handled this flight cancellation for medical reasons. Good on them. It’s nice to have customer service exceed your expectations in a difficult situation.
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Family of 5 used miles to book a spring break trip to the Grand Canyon. 1 month before the trip I was diagnosed with breast cancer, needing a radical mastectomy. AA redeposited all the miles and canceled the (then) $100/pp fee. I am a big fan of AA!
Glad to hear they were helpful
Have had similar experiences with AA. On the other hand, I tried to book a UA award and had transferred Chase UR points into my MileagePlus account only for it to error out on me all the time. I called and the inventory wasn’t there to begin with and UA refused to open up inventory or to reverse the Chase transfer.
Yeah, I’ve gotten to where I call United to verify before transferring points :/
Bryan,
AA is also very nice in my case. I had a heart attack about 3 weeks before my trip to Sydney. I called AA to cancel my trip and asked her about waiver my cancel fees due to heart attack. She asked me to wait for her to talk with her supervisor and later came back and told me just give her the name of hospital and the phone number to verify. I did and few minutes later she told me her boss agree to waiver the fees and this was for 3 people !!! I should write something about it but I did not have the chance and did not want to write in FB. Hope someone from AA read this and we are very appreciate it.
Agreed! AA was absolutely wonderful when my mom got sick after the first leg of a connecting flight. I wish I had an Above & Beyond/AAplause certificate for the rep but I used up all of mine.
I don’t even know what those are…?
I was sick and needed to cancel and AA flight. I emailed and wrote them several letters to see if they would help me out and included a doctor’s note saying that I was not to fly. They ignored all of my correspondence.
Wow! When was this?
Why didn’t you give them a call.
I had to cancel an award flight at the last minute due to the issues with my fertility treatments. I had flights for both me and my toddler son. I called American, and they were extremely understanding. They credited back my miles with no issue. I wouldn’t expect that to happen again, but I was very grateful.