This airline is holding flights so passengers don't miss their connections
It might seem counterintuitive, but American Airlines is experimenting with making travel faster and more efficient by sometimes delaying its flights.
Last May, the U.S. airline announced it would begin testing the new technology at its Dallas-Fort Worth hub. The idea was to identify departing flights with incoming connecting customers who might miss that flight.
“If the airline determines it can delay the flight without any impact to the airline’s schedule, we will propose a short hold to get those connecting customers onboard,” it said in a press release.
“The technology, developed in-house by the American team, helps automate and enhance existing processes to hold certain connecting flights so the airline can help even more customers make their connections and get to their final destinations.”
The airline has since expanded the program to additional locations, including international airports in Los Angeles, Charlotte, N.C., Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia and Phoenix, Arizona.
“I think it’s great that we have the ability to do it,” Michael Wanner, managing director for the American Airlines control centre at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, told the Charlotte Observer of the so-called “connection-saving technology.” The airport started using the system just before the busy Memorial Day weekend last year.
“Normally, we wouldn’t even look at one passenger,” Wanner said. “But that one passenger is just as important as the other 189 on there. If you can do a short hold to get them where they are tonight, to get them home, that’s a win for us and a win for the customer.”
The airline told azcentral (an Arizona news site affiliated with USA Today) in September when the system was rolled out in Phoenix that it uses artificial intelligence in the technology as well as in other aspects of operations.
The airline said it “handles large volumes of data from a range of sources” to improve its customer service and operations, and that AI “can be very helpful to this effort.”
American Airlines’ spokesperson Luisa Barrientos Flores told travel site Afar.com that the airline “considers a complex algorithm that takes dozens of inputs that the tool analyzes to ensure there is no downline impact to the overall schedule or customer itineraries.”
When flights are held, customers are informed via text, email or through the airlines’ own app, telling them how long their connecting flight will wait at the gate. The app has recently been updated to include turn-by-turn directions to connecting gates with estimated walk times and real-time flight status updates.
Flores said that, on average, “flights are held for 10 minutes to help customers reach their connecting flights.”
According to Afar.com , a Reddit user last month posted an image of a text she received from American Airlines indicating a 17-minute hold on her connecting flight and advising her to “head to gate B16 as soon as you arrive” in Charlotte.
“Been on quite a few American flights, a lot w/ short layovers,” she wrote, adding that her first flight had been delayed 50 minutes and she worried she wouldn’t make the second. “It was last flight out of the night and there were a bunch of connecting passengers so it makes sense that they’d hold it,” she added.
The concept of holding one flight to connect to another is not new — United Airlines was trumpeting a similar “ConnectionSaver” tool back in 2019 — but the use of AI and additional communication with passengers has made it more effective.
National Post has reached out to American Airlines for more information.
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