It seems like this has been the air travel summer from hell.
The Microsoft outage, weather delays, and overall airport chaos have made going on summer vacation far more of an ordeal than it usually is. Every other day someone goes viral on TikTok for showcasing the ridiculous long lines at airports, or for exposing how long they’ve been sitting on the tarmac. Everyone you know has probably had some sort of airport horror story from this past summer.
And as the summer comes to a close, the air travel nightmares still haven’t stopped. Italian Kate on TikTok documented a journey from Puerto Rico to Miami gone awry through the excellent storytelling skills of Dimas.
It all started when the passengers on their American Airlines flight boarded their plane around 5:30 PM. They were on the flight for a couple of hours, but ended up circling for a while due to less-than-ideal weather conditions. Eventually, the pilot had to make an emergency landing in the Bahamas at around 8:30 PM, local time.
They sat on the tarmac for two more hours with the hope of taking off again, but eventually, the crew timed out and everyone had to deboard the plane. The problem is that a flight from Miami to Puerto Rico is a domestic flight, so none of the passengers has their passports with them.
Because of that, none of them were allowed to leave the gate, let alone the terminal or airport, as they were technically in the Bahamas illegally. At the time of the video, it was 5:40 AM, and the 100 passengers had been sitting there for nine hours.
According to Dimas, they’d originally been told within 30 minutes of their arrival that another crew was on the way. Obviously, that turned out to not be the case. They’d only had contact with the two gate agents and their pleas to call immigration so that they could at least get a hotel, had been rejected. According to Dimas’s comment on Kate’s original video, they didn’t leave the Bahamas until 10:15 AM.
Essentially the whole American Airlines flight was stranded at the gate, running on soda and Biscoff cookies. Some couldn’t even access much-needed medication because it was still aboard their aircraft, and they had one bathroom for a hundred people.
People in the comment section are equally as outraged as they are impressed by Dimas’s journalistic abilities. Some people are joking that it seemed like the whole plane was kidnapped to the Bahamas, others said it seems like American Airlines is always in this kind of hot water.
The main consensus was that a refund wasn’t going to cut it this time, viewers wanted to see these passengers pursue legal action.
In a video on his own page documenting the journey, Dimas noted that they didn’t receive a hotel or transportation vouchers from American Airlines for their troubles. He ended up driving home from Miami to North Carolina because he found out that he hadn’t actually been rebooked on his connecting flight, as he was told that he had in the Bahamas. What was supposed to be a quick trip home, turned into a grueling, 44-hour travel slog.
According to the United States Department of Transportation, airline passengers are entitled to a refund anytime a flight is canceled or if there is a significant delay or schedule change, meaning that these passengers well-deserved a refund on their flight. The Department of Transportation also regulates that those refunds have to be issued within seven business days of the change or cancellation.
As for transportation and hotel vouchers, according to American Airlines’s website, vouchers for hotels are supposed to be issued for customers who are delayed overnight if the delay is caused by the airline. They are also supposed to rebook customers with their partner airlines free of charge if there are no available rebookings until the day after the scheduled trip.
AA promises to make every reasonable effort to give delayed passengers access to food, water, restrooms, and medical assistance.
The people on this particular American Airlines flight seem much less than impressed with the airline’s customer service and accommodations. And the internet is stacked behind them. AA has yet to make a public response about this situation, but based on the tags in the comments, the people are ready and waiting.