Jennie says she arranged for a ticket on American Airlines to have her boss’s mom fly from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. The passenger suffers from dementia and somehow ended up on the wrong flight, headed instead to Texas. Jennie says the airline admitted fault, refunded the ticket and even sent her flowers, but she says the efforts weren’t enough because the woman is terrified to fly now.

Jennie writes:

My boss’s mother was flying out of Santa Fe New Mexico. She’s an elderly woman and I had called and booked her ticket with an agent to make sure she was given special attention as she would be flying by herself. Everything was going well until we got a scared phone call from my boss’s sister saying that his mother had somehow been escorted onto the wrong plane and was now in a 3 hour lay over in Texas. She had all the right information including proper ticketing by American Airlines etc, but somehow the idiots who are supposed to look at your ticket and put you on the proper plane ended up putting her on a plane to Texas instead of to Los Angeles. So much for airport security? No flight attendant bothered to check her ticket once she was on board or even attempt to rectify the situation. The woman has minor dementia and was terribly confused and in pain. Once she landed in Texas some flight attendant took pity on her and managed to reroute her to a flight back to Los Angeles.

The kicker is that once we called and found out what happened the airline wasn’t going to refund the ticket immediately… they then put her on a return flight back in COACH in a MIDDLE SEAT. They couldn’t even bump her up to first class?

After screaming at agents on the phone we managed to get the flight refunded and they sent us flowers to the house… yeah like that’s going to make up for the disaster. The woman is now completely petrified of getting on another plane.

We even got an e-mail from the ticketing agent who checked her in apologizing and admitting that the whole situation was her fault.

Jennie thinks her boss and his mother deserve a free flight. If you think American Airlines didn’t adequately make up for the mistake, what should the airline have done?

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