American Airlines’ Outage Shows Agents’ Value

An American Airlines res system outage that led to hundreds of cancelled and delayed flights on Tuesday gave travel agents yet another opportunity to demonstrate their worth.

These situations “reinforce the value of a travel agent,” said Jennifer Wilson-Buttigieg, co-president of New York-based Valerie Wilson Travel. “We were able to be a resource that offered other alternatives to clients. And we had clients that were thrilled to know we had alternatives for them.”

System-wide outage
American suffered what it called a “system-wide network outage,” starting at midday on April 16 and lasting until about 5 p.m., Eastern time. The outage led to the cancellation of an estimated 1,000 flights and the delay of scores more.

The carrier said the problems were related to its inability to access its reservations system.

“As you’d imagine, we do have redundancies in our systems, but unfortunately in this case we had a software issue that impacted both our primary and backup systems,” American CEO Tom Horton said in a videoed apology.

As a result, the carrier was unable to access passenger records for the duration of the outage.

Big deal
For agents, the impact of the flight cancellations, delays and American’s res system outage depended on their location and that of their clientele.

New York is a major American hub, so the outage was a “big deal” for Valerie Wilson Travel, said Wilson-Buttigieg.

“There were thousands of people inconvenienced for Valerie Wilson Travel because of our national presence with 16 offices and the global presence of our clients.”

AA supports unavailable
Normally when a flight is cancelled the agency tries to re-book the client with American, but the carrier was unable to do that, she said. “It didn’t matter if you were stranded at the airport or in your office, it didn’t have the ability to see who was on each plane, which is why it had to have a ground stop.”

That also meant that agents could not rely on their usual backup supports at American. “For our advisors, all our usual tools of going to American sales support or its executive desk, all those tools wouldn’t work,” Wilson-Buttigieg said.

“Once we realized the American system was down, our advisors were in a far better way to help our clients [than American] because we still had our main [Sabre] system where we could book other carriers,” said Wilson-Buttigieg.

Not just the immediate
An outage like Tuesday’s has implications beyond the obvious immediate effects, according to Wilson-Buttigieg.

“It affected any future booking,” she said. “Someone looking to book their summer vacation or a corporate trip next week to London — that person wants to do that right then. The travel professional has many different tools than just one airline.”

American, meanwhile, announced it would waive change fees for delayed passengers who want to re-book. For passengers who choose not to re-book, it offered full refunds.

Wilson-Buttigieg said that in her experience Tuesday’s outage was extremely unusual, with airline res system or GDS downtimes usually lasting no more than a couple of minutes.

Marilee Crocker contributed to this report.