Merging USAirways and American has been such a challenge they don’t need sabotage. More likely it’s just a merger mess.
I’ve been trying to get onto American’s website today. It’s usually difficult but it’s impossible to get it to work today.
Dallas paper says that the USAir hubs didn’t have the problem. The airline denies that the op center had anything to do with it.
Last Saturday I flew from Ontario CA to Columbia SC. When I checked in at Ontario I received a boarding pass for my American flight from Ontario to Dallas but not for my US Air flight on to Columbia. My bags were also not checked through to Columbia. When I questioned the American employee, she told me to get my US Air boarding pass from the US Air counter and I had to claim my bags and recheck them with US Air when I changed planes.
So I went to the US Air counter and told the US Air employee what the American employee had told me. She went ballistic and went to the American counter and went full bore R. Lee Ermey on them. Then she returned to me and issued boarding passes for all my flights that day and correctly checked my bags to my final destination.
These corporate mergers have become strictly excuses to give the hired hand CEOs a big bonus for doing nothing (or worse like Carly Fiorina with CPQ).
Typically the end result is a lesser company and less competition. They screw shareholders, customers, customer service, reduce innovation, and almost always increase costs to customers.
I was a long time member of what was when it started out years ago a very small credit union. It ended up much larger not by serving their customers but by doing mergers. The CEO would tout the increased number of members, but their loan rates kept going up and deposit rates going down. They once had almost no fees and ended up with more fees than a bank. I examined their IRS non-profit tax form only to discover that the CEO was making close to a million who got big raises every year for making it bigger through mergers, not through better service. This is the gig that is played all over America, whether it be airlines or banks, etc.. We need competition to make better businesses.