Air travel has officially been grounded.
American Airlines passengers continue to be disappointed after paying for what they believed was a flight, only to be boarded onto a bus.
One woman, traveling from South Bend, Indiana, to Chicago O’Hare, cleared security and arrived at her gate, only to notice that her checked luggage was being loaded onto a parked coach bus.
She assumed it was meant to shuttle her to the plane, not replace it.
“There’s no plane,” Kennedy Woodard-Jones told The Washington Post. “It took me a second for it to really lock in that this is not a plane ride.”
It was only after the American Airlines-branded bus left the tarmac for the open road that Woodard-Jones realized that the flight she thought she paid for was in fact a bus ride.
A “panicking” Woodard-Jones detailed her unwanted road trip in a viral TikTok video.
“When you buy a flight from American Airlines, but they board you onto a bus on the tarmac so you think they’re driving you to the plane, but they just start driving to the destination,” the caption read.
She joins a legion of travelers who have unknowingly booked a bus ride through American Airlines’ Landline service.
Launched in 2018, Landline, which American Airlines describes as ‘a premium motor coach experience,’ connects travelers to or from Philadelphia and Chicago O’Hare with smaller airports nearby.
Landline has also partnered with Air Canada and Sun Country Airlines to transport travelers from regional communities to major hubs that were once served by small planes.
“We’re saving them time and money, and we’re giving them a really awesome product experience on the way,” Landline Company CEO David Sunde told the Washington Post.
American Airlines said the service operates “just like a flight would,” short of actually being a flight or arriving at destinations in a timeframe consistent with air travel.
“Customers earn their AAdvantage miles and Loyalty Points on eligible fares, check their baggage and enjoy the trip with complimentary Wi-Fi and power at every seat,” the airline added.
Sunde maintains that airlines are transparent about the Landline bus service at the time of booking. Further, he said that the motor coach experience bests driving and saves customers from paying for airport parking.
However, Woodard-Jones, who takes at least two flights a month, said she noticed no mention of a bus when she booked her trip.
Still, Suade believes that those, like Woodard-Jones, who are unaware that they are booking a bus trip end up “pleasantly surprised” by the swap.
Evidence suggests otherwise.
In a post on X, one customer and owner of a roofing company slammed American Airlines for selling him a first-class ticket redeemable only for an hour-long bus journey.
“Can I sell someone a roof, and instead, install a new driveway for them?” he wrote. “How small was that fine print??? What a JOKE.”
His experience mirrors that of a New York woman who went viral last year for documenting her own similarly surprising bus ride in a TikTok video with over 2 million views.
“POV: When your American Airlines ‘flight’ is actually a bus,” user Alex (@she_is.becoming) wrote in the text overlay on the video of her unexpected ride.
The mode of transport was especially confusing as there was a “flight icon” on her boarding pass, she noted in the caption.
The upstate native then navigated security and arrived at her gate, noting that the flight board showed her American Airlines flight number and an airplane icon, and that travelers boarded according to their group numbers.
Alex said she was especially confused, as American Airlines makes it abundantly clear that the journey’s first leg involves a bus, whereas Google Flights is much more cryptic about it. They simply write “bus” in small text under the airline name, sans any giant distinction between the modes of transport.
“I did go back through and see if I totally missed something, and I didn’t,” Alex explained. “It is not clear on there at all.”
“I also just wanna add to that that when you are looking at a website called Google Flights, I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect to be looking at flights,” she declared.
According to Sunde, the ultimate goal of Landline is to “expand American airport infrastructure to be closer to where you live…” by hook or by crook, by sky or by highway.
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