Matt Cleinman’s recent flights from Barcelona to Portland, Ore., did not go well. Actually, that’s an understatement. “It was easily the worst airline experience I’ve ever had,” he said after American Airlines left him stranded at the airport.
Although Shelley Jones’ complaint is common, I’ve never heard it from someone like her. Her problem: She’s done with airline “codesharing” — a marketing arrangement in which an airline places its designator code on a flight operated by another airline, and sells tickets for that flight. She’s seen too many passengers pull up to the wrong terminal because they thought they were flying on one carrier when, in fact, they were booked on another.
In a world of airline code-sharing and outsourced call centers, who takes ultimate responsibility when something goes wrong with your flight?
