Following its latest earnings report, passengers and American Airlines employees say ongoing customer service issues, leadership problems, and operational failures are hurting the airline’s ability to compete with its rivals.
“American Airlines is positioned for significant upside in 2026 and beyond,” said American’s CEO Robert Isom while reporting the airline’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 financial results. “We have built a strong foundation, and we look forward to taking advantage of the investments we have made in our customer experience, network, fleet, partnerships and loyalty program. The strategy we have in place will put American in the right position as we celebrate our centennial and embark on our next 100 years as a premium global airline.”
But despite whatever spin they put on it, American Airlines is having quite the crisis.
The airline’s problems
- For 2025, they made $54.6 billion in revenue, but barely $111 million in profits (by comparison, during the same time frame, Delta made over $5 billion in profits; United: $3.35 billion)
- Recent headlines (Fodor’s, Business Insider and others) about flight attendants having to sleep on the floor when flights were cancelled due to weather (and Isom suggesting “that is to be expected.”)
- They were #3 for flight delays in 2025 (behind Frontier and tied with JetBlue and Southwest).
- According to a study, American Airlines is also the U.S. airline most likely to mishandle (read: lose or break) your luggage.
And that’s on top of complaint after complaint about unannounced flight changes, refusal to assist with rescheduling, extra charges for checked bags, baby strollers that were broken after they were gate checked, upwards of 9-hour flight delays with no communications or assistance, and the list of “poor customer service” goes on and on.
Not that Delta and United are perfect – of course they’re not. But Delta’s been named Best Airline (or similar) by The Points Guy, Forbes Travel Guide, J.D. Power and even Newsweek in the past six months alone. And even Ben Schlappig from OMAAT has admitted, “United is the carrier that has been gaining the most momentum and trending upward in the past couple of years.”
How can American improve?
Obviously, American Airlines has a problem on its hands. And it’s been simmering for quite some time. Before the airline continues to circle into despair, it obviously needs to do SOMETHING. Or rather, some THINGS. Exactly what those things are? Welp a bunch of people on multiple American Airlines forums on social media – from economy PAX to AAdvantage Executive Platinum people to gate agents to flight attendants to pilots and more – were more than happy to add their 2 cents. Here’s what they had to say:
Improve customer service
Customer service seemed to be an oft-repeated theme.
- Prioritize customer service PERIOD. Especially during IROPS periods. The fault of issues isn’t that they occurred so much as the airlines inability to deal with them. The culture of no is far too pervasive. — opticpipe (AAdvantage Exec. Plat.)
- You can’t call customer service. You have to email them. Hopefully it’s not a hurry… When you email them from a web form that’s ridiculously detailed and meant to suggest you shouldn’t bother, you get an auto reply and it’s never followed up with a real reply from a person.
They need to give a sh*t. Like the CEO needs to fly coach at least once a week. They need to have “secret shoppers” on flights. They need to make customer satisfaction the #1 priority.
Caring about people starts at the top. If the employees don’t feel like the airline cares about them, they won’t make the passengers feel like it cares about them. Instead, they’ll spend the flight playing games on their phones. And that’s where we are. — opticspipe - Better trained and friendly gate agents at the hubs like PHL and ORD. Stop outsourcing customer service when you call. Stop blaming the weather for poor scheduling and employee issues. Treat customers like people instead of self loading cargo.– Armand5006
- The overall experience with AA staff is terrible. I am over 50 and have been EXP more than half my life. Every year I find employees just to be a little more miserable. Of course there are amazing employees, but they are really rare. Now it doesn’t help I am based in Miami I am sure – still – but if there is one thing that needs fixing it is corporate culture – not really easy to do of course. For those of you that remember the “employee owner culture” of UA in the 90s – it actually was the main reason I switched to AA. Now I am almost 4 million AA miles, so I am going to hang in there to reach lifetime Emerald – but from an overall experience perspective AA is the worst now.– Boredintown1
- I travel nearly every week, and would generally agree that there is minimal difference in hard product between the big 3.
However, the most important thing to me is on time arrival, and when issues do arise, they’re handled quickly and professionally. This is where American is significantly worse than Delta and United IMO.
For American to gain market share, this is where they must improve, although I wonder if it’s too late to materially change customer perception. In my experience their on time performance is far worse than Delta and United, and why I only fly them if absolutely necessary.
Cancellations and weather delays are bound to happen occasionally, but when they do American’s agents seem apathetic to help. I always come prepared with other options, routing, flight #s etc – and am prepared to be flexible. On Delta and United, this works nearly every time. Whereas on American, if their system says a flight 24 hours later is the best they can do – that’s exactly what you’re going to get.
Not saying Delta and United are perfect, but (in my experience) when it comes to soft product, American is substantially worse. — johnmu2005 - They don’t give customers a reason to actually spend on their products because they have terrible understanding of their customers. Customer outreach could tell them they want to spend more money on business class and AA would start removing all business class from their fleet.– Bottasche
Get new management
Another comment that came up over and over was the status of today’s AA management – what they do…and don’t do.
- New management team with a vision that employees can rally around and improve morale. AA employees do not believe in the current management team and its current vision or lack there of…
Get back to putting customers first and give employees the tools needed to take care of customers…
Get costs under control and let go of the over reliance of high CASM RJ flying… Continue to cleaning up the balance books… — swakid8 - Bring back Tom Horton or hire a CEO that has never worked for America West. All AA really need to do is copy Delta, United did it and they are now profitable.– deleted username
- Management needs to give a sh*t beyond just on time satisfaction. All of the things I see people complain about can be fixed if management actually cared but they don’t.– Old_Flan9471
- As a former AA manager, the company is plagued with endless leadership issues and people with ZERO experience making decisions. And senior managers expecting loyalty over best decisions. AA won’t right the ship until they handle the true systemic problems. — Worried-Ebb-1699
- The problem is discount airline leadership trying to superimpose the discount airline mindset onto a carrier with global reach.– Feisty-Barracuda5452
- The Top Tier Management Sucks at running an airline. It been like that since the Pandemic. Let’s get rid of all the aircraft we’re not going to need them. Oh Crap we need aircraft ! We’ll get some. There’s none to be had, So buy some we did but they won’t be here for 5 years . So what do we do when the public wants to know why we suck. Blame the Employee’s. Those dang agents and ramp workers don’t have a clue what there doing.– Fo=irmOwl7086
- Passengers, employees and even shareholders are all fed up. It’s true that sh*t rolls downhill, and the Board needs to clean house by replacing most of the executive management team.– gridskip
Some words from the wise
Some of the comments just made SO MUCH SENSE:
- Essentially as higher bosses become rich millionaires they start thinking like millionaires obsessed with money instead of thinking like a regular passenger. Remember what police officers say: if you want to catch a criminal you need to think like a criminal. AA leadership needs to understand the passenger mindset if they want to fix the experience and keep their business. And the low rank people is discarded and replaced ,or feel obligated to quit whyyyy? Because the leadership prioritizes loyalty over actual skill or understanding of the job. When people who know the front-line work are constantly shuffled out, the company loses institutional knowledge and passenger insight. That’s how mistakes keep repeating and service keeps getting worse– B777X_787-9
- Ask yourself why companies with humble people actually running the show keep doing very well. They listen to their front-line employees, focus on the customer experience, and make smart decisions instead of just chasing profits. That’s the exact opposite of what AA’s leadership is doing. They prefer to have people licking their higher bosses the ass than doing better decisions.That is not the way to run a centenary company,sorry. — B777X_787-9
What do you think?
There were some other ways people thought AA could improve – trickle down theories so employees could he happier and give better customer service, understanding what their customers actually want, the culture of America West and US Airways still in the mix, etc.
But what do YOU think? What does American Airlines need to do to to improve its position among the legacy airlines?
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