What issues are compensated for under American’s new iSolve program?

Recently, American Airlines announced that they would be using a new tool called iSolve on their inflight flight attendant tablets to provide on-the-spot compensation for service or other failures inflight.

To this point, it was really only speculated on what types of issues would warrant compensation, but now we have more information, as there are 4 categories that compensation will fall under.

Here are the “inconveniences” that flight attendants will be given power to resolve inflight:

• Inflight Entertainment that is inoperable (this does NOT include inflight internet issues).
• Seat issues, such as a broken tray table, an inoperable seat, having to swap seats to accommodate a flight attendant/crew request, etc.
• Catering issues such as a meal shortage or missing special meals. I suspect this does not mean that compensation is due for a first class passenger who does not get their first choice on meals, however (which I’m totally fine with).
• Cabin comfort issues such as a broken reading light, or an inflight spill that requires dry cleaning.

Issues that fall outside of the categories above will require the customer to contact customer relations, and flight attendants won’t be empowered to compensate on the spot (which I think is reasonable, since the categories listed seem to cover most issues that would occur).

I do kind of find it funny that they refer to this as an “inconvenience” and not a “service failure.” Guess having a broken tray table that won’t even come out of the holder is an inconvenience rather than a failure? 😛

Based on some outside reports, here’s what I believe to be typical compensation amounts for a flight length of about 2 hours for a passenger seated in First Class (NOTE: I am unsure if this differs from paid First Class tickets) with broken inflight entertainment:

• Non Status Passenger / Gold – 5,000 miles compensation.
• Platinum / Platinum Pro – between 5,000-10,000 miles compensation.
• Executive Platinum  – 10,000 miles compensation.
• Concierge Key – 15,000 miles compensation.

Again, by no means are these set in stone, and I’m not 100% sure they are correct. What’s worth noting, however, is that compensation varies depending on class of service, elite status and service inconvenience. That info goes into some sort of algorithm to come up with a pre-determined number.

Anyways, cool info to know regardless!