American Airlines review by Raven Wright

My husband and I purchased tickets from ILM to DTW on 6/9/24 to go home over labor day weekend. We were going home to Michigan from North Carolina to introduce our 4 month old to our family. We departed ILM on 8/30, this flight was initially delayed taking off to CLT due to a mechanical issue. This late departure caused us to hit severe storms around the CLT airport leaving our plane unable to land in CLT for which we were re-routed to Greensburg-Spartanburg, SC airport. We sat on the tarmac (not being allowed off the plane) for 4 hours with our 4 month old and our dog onboard. When we were finally allowed to go back to CLT our plane to DTW had taken off ~20 minutes prior to us landing resulting in that flight to be missed. When we landed, the flight attendants promised us that there would be an agent AT THE GATE to help us all rebook our flights. After all of the passengers deboarded, that attendant at the gate helped 3 people and then LEFT the rest of us standing there with no explanation or help, never coming back. I was finally able to get our flight rebooked for 11am on 8/31 and then we went to collect our luggage and, to my surprise, an AA employee in baggage claim told us our bags were going to be sent to our final destination regardless of rebooking and refused to give us back our car seat for our 4 month baby. After AA left us stranded in CLT (3 hours away from our home in ILM) we had to book a hotel to stay overnight and had no car seat for our baby making those rides extremely dangerous. AA refused to refund our tickets and baggage fees because we "rebooked our flights". We had NO choice but to rebook because our car seat would have been sent to Michigan anyways and there was no way were were taking a 3 hour car ride back to ILM with no car seat for our baby. Then on the following flight for 8/31, our flight was delayed again due to a missing flight attendant, for which no one knew where she was.