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My wife and I had the (dis)pleasure of being American Eagle customers for the first time on Monday June 7. We had flown WN flight 1735 from HOU-MSY-MCO-FLL and the flight was great and on-time at 12:20pm. We recovered our luggage from the baggage claim at FLL's terminal 1. It was a relatively new looking facility, with great lighting and aquariums! So we left terminal one and caught the shuttle over to Terminal 4 for our American Eagle flight. We made it to the line for the ticket counter at 12:40pm for our 1:30 departure. There were no more than 25-30 Customers in front of us in line. We didn't make it until the counter until 1:15! AA has such a F*ed up system, at least at FLL. There were about 5 agents helping the people at the SELF-checking kiosks. There were 2 agents helping the first-class, gold, diamond or whatever they call it. Finally there were 2 agents checking all the other passengers. One agent was dealing with an upset woman who was needing to send her pet parrots as baggage. The other agent, once we got to the counter informed us that we would not make our flight. 
I have been flying since I was a months old, literally hundreds of times and never have I missed a flight due to my own fault. She puts us on standby for the next flight at 2:35. When we get to the gate we see a posted delay that the flight will not leave until 3:10. And storms are moving into the area.
My wife and I go the window to see passengers being loaded off a Spirit airlines flight onto buses on the tarmac that evidently had some emergency. The gate agent comes over the PA, and tell us "The aircraft coming for the 3:10 flight to Nassau has just left Nassau and should be here in about 45 minutes.
Next was the most odd transaction I have ever experienced with an airline. The gate agent, knowing we were standby, comes over and sees our standbypasses in my wife's backpack. She takes our standby tix and replaces them with our boarding passes and says only the word "trade." And she turns around and leaves. She didn't put the tickets in our hands, she didn't say Mr. ________ here are your passes. She just says "trade" and leaves.
We finally got on our Super ATR-72, the ugliest, most squatty little plane I've ever seen in an airline fleet. We were seated and I told my wife, "Geez, my truck rides higher than this." We only saw our flight attendant for a few minutes. She had long stringy red hair pulled back in a quick, non-professional pony-tail. She was wearing no or very little lake-up and she was a frumpy looking woman.
We sat there several minutes in the sweltering heat on the most worn-out dirtiest plane I have ever seen. All the windows were dirty and appeared to have stress fractures or major scratches. Finally a pilot or F/O comes onboard carrying a plastic sack with 2 lunches in styrofoam boxes. We (presumedly) wait for them to eat for about 10 more minutes before the engines get fired up. Then the engines are powered down. The pilot comes on: "Hi folks, yeah, evidently there's a panel still open on the back of the aircraft and they wanted to get that closed, but we'l be started again in just a few minutes." To me it sounded like "Well we probably could have made it just fine but they made me turn the plane off while they closed that door." When we finally got airborn, at around 3:30pm, we noticed how quiet it was. Nobody was talking to each other like on Southwest like we're used to. So we were in the last row of the plane on the starboard side. I'm in 16D and my wife in 16C. When we landed and waited for the Jetway to be positioned. Our frumpy flight attendant starts talking to the ramp agent and we overhear her say "Are you kidding me? This is American Eagle. Our motto is "We aren't trying to make your life easier." 
If tried to catch her name on her badge on the way out to have her written up but it was flipped around.
On the way back today (6/11) we were booked on American Eagle flight 1540 which was scheduled for a 11:30 departure, boarding at 10:45. Now why it takes 45 minutes to turn a 60 seat turbo-prop when WN can turn a 137 seat 737 in 20 minutes is beyond me. And AA wonders why they lose money. We didn't board until 1130 and leave NAS until 12:05 and we had a 2:00pm WN flight to connect to once we landed over at terminal 1. We were seated in row 7 this time so my wife asked the flight attendant if we could move to a vacant row at the very back so we could have a better chance of making our 2:00 connection. He said "Well you should have asked me earlier, because I have already given the pilot the weights and balances. My wife handled it gracefully. If it were me I probably would have coused a scene: "Well I work for Southwest Airlines and your customer service sucks!" But I didn't have to resort to that. A few minutes later the other flight attendant comes and apologizes and says we are welcome to move. We got off the plane at FLL at 1:10pm in terminal 3. We made it to the WN ticket counter by 1:32. Our bags were late checked. It took us 15 minutes to get thru the TSA checkpoint with only 4 people in front of us. We were able to board our flight with 5 minutes to spare. 
On our WN flight FLL-TPA-MSY-HOU then transfer HOU-DAL we had the same flight crew the whole way. They were great and smiled just as much on the last flight as they did on their first. 
Overall my experience with American was horrible and I will never fly them again if I can at all avoid it. The only reason I chose them over CO to begin with is because AA had a better schedule - if only they were on time.
Thanks for reading my rant. I had to get it all out as soon as I got home so I remember it all.
I have been flying since I was a months old, literally hundreds of times and never have I missed a flight due to my own fault. She puts us on standby for the next flight at 2:35. When we get to the gate we see a posted delay that the flight will not leave until 3:10. And storms are moving into the area.
My wife and I go the window to see passengers being loaded off a Spirit airlines flight onto buses on the tarmac that evidently had some emergency. The gate agent comes over the PA, and tell us "The aircraft coming for the 3:10 flight to Nassau has just left Nassau and should be here in about 45 minutes.
Next was the most odd transaction I have ever experienced with an airline. The gate agent, knowing we were standby, comes over and sees our standbypasses in my wife's backpack. She takes our standby tix and replaces them with our boarding passes and says only the word "trade." And she turns around and leaves. She didn't put the tickets in our hands, she didn't say Mr. ________ here are your passes. She just says "trade" and leaves.
We finally got on our Super ATR-72, the ugliest, most squatty little plane I've ever seen in an airline fleet. We were seated and I told my wife, "Geez, my truck rides higher than this." We only saw our flight attendant for a few minutes. She had long stringy red hair pulled back in a quick, non-professional pony-tail. She was wearing no or very little lake-up and she was a frumpy looking woman.
We sat there several minutes in the sweltering heat on the most worn-out dirtiest plane I have ever seen. All the windows were dirty and appeared to have stress fractures or major scratches. Finally a pilot or F/O comes onboard carrying a plastic sack with 2 lunches in styrofoam boxes. We (presumedly) wait for them to eat for about 10 more minutes before the engines get fired up. Then the engines are powered down. The pilot comes on: "Hi folks, yeah, evidently there's a panel still open on the back of the aircraft and they wanted to get that closed, but we'l be started again in just a few minutes." To me it sounded like "Well we probably could have made it just fine but they made me turn the plane off while they closed that door." When we finally got airborn, at around 3:30pm, we noticed how quiet it was. Nobody was talking to each other like on Southwest like we're used to. So we were in the last row of the plane on the starboard side. I'm in 16D and my wife in 16C. When we landed and waited for the Jetway to be positioned. Our frumpy flight attendant starts talking to the ramp agent and we overhear her say "Are you kidding me? This is American Eagle. Our motto is "We aren't trying to make your life easier." If tried to catch her name on her badge on the way out to have her written up but it was flipped around. On the way back today (6/11) we were booked on American Eagle flight 1540 which was scheduled for a 11:30 departure, boarding at 10:45. Now why it takes 45 minutes to turn a 60 seat turbo-prop when WN can turn a 137 seat 737 in 20 minutes is beyond me. And AA wonders why they lose money. We didn't board until 1130 and leave NAS until 12:05 and we had a 2:00pm WN flight to connect to once we landed over at terminal 1. We were seated in row 7 this time so my wife asked the flight attendant if we could move to a vacant row at the very back so we could have a better chance of making our 2:00 connection. He said "Well you should have asked me earlier, because I have already given the pilot the weights and balances. My wife handled it gracefully. If it were me I probably would have coused a scene: "Well I work for Southwest Airlines and your customer service sucks!" But I didn't have to resort to that. A few minutes later the other flight attendant comes and apologizes and says we are welcome to move. We got off the plane at FLL at 1:10pm in terminal 3. We made it to the WN ticket counter by 1:32. Our bags were late checked. It took us 15 minutes to get thru the TSA checkpoint with only 4 people in front of us.
We were able to board our flight with 5 minutes to spare. On our WN flight FLL-TPA-MSY-HOU then transfer HOU-DAL we had the same flight crew the whole way. They were great and smiled just as much on the last flight as they did on their first. Overall my experience with American was horrible and I will never fly them again if I can at all avoid it. The only reason I chose them over CO to begin with is because AA had a better schedule - if only they were on time.
Thanks for reading my rant. I had to get it all out as soon as I got home so I remember it all.
Stop Searching. Start Traveling. southwest.com 
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