American Airlines - AAL > Reviews > Great Prices --- Uncomfortable Flights

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Very poor
Customer Service	Nothing special
Punctuality	Good
Space	Fairly Comfortable
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Cheap and Punctual (most of the time)
Disadvantages:	Food, alcohol not free, domestic connections, rude staff

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I had a recent flight from LHR to SAN via JFK return with American Airlines. The return flight cost £360pp Economy in January via the AA website which is pretty cheap to the West Coast.

Outbound:

Check in at Heathrow was quick and easy and the clerk was friendly and helpful.

Since we had a connecting flight, we were prevented from purchasing spirits as we had to go through security again at JFK (no liquids) read on and find out more in a bit!

As the Americans don't trust British airport security, you have to go through a 2nd security channel at the gate which can take a while, but otherwise boarding is okay.

We flew on a newish Boeing 777 to New York initially. Overall it was a comfortable flight with great seat pitch and width (i'm 6'3 so that's saying a lot!) The inflight entertainment (indiviual screens) kept crashing and I missed the last 10 minutes of Transformers!

It goes downhill from here. The stingy airlines do not offer complimentary alcoholic beverages on the flights unlike BA and Virgin so I had to pay extra (soft drinks are free). The food is terrible and why they don't just make normal meals I don't know!

Arrival at JFK was a nightmare, we had to queue up twice as none of us were informed of the correct landing cards to fill out first time round. Immigration officors are rude and obnoxious but I won't dwell on that for this review!

Remember my whole Duty Free issue before?...in this airport terminal I could not buy any spirits whatsoever as our connceting leg of the journey was domestic! Ahhhhh!!!!!

The 2nd leg of our joureny was worse. It was an older boeing jet and the seat pitch was not as great which was made worse by the lady in front fully reclining her seat to my knees and then seemingly bouncing back and forth on her seat?!?

Once in San Diego the bags where out quickly and we got through to arrivals pretty quickly.

Inbound:

Our return leg was supposed to be via Chicago but as the airport was snow-covered our flight had to be changed to go via Los angeles

This was a flight on a small American Eagle propellor plane which lasted 40 minutes. Horrible! It was noisy and turbulant and the cabin staff of 1 was rude, seemed to have no clue about her job and she spent more time talking to her Latino comprades in the front row seats.

The LAX-LHR leg was fine although our wait at the terminal was about 5 hours. No complaints here other than what I mentioned previously, It was not that packed so we managed to stretch out a bit more with extra seats!

The price of the flight was great but I wouldn't recommend any indirect journeys where u need to connect or if u do, book it seperately with a domestic airline.