American: Normal schedule days away — chicagotribune.com
The number of canceled American flights stands at more than 3,000 since late Tuesday, wreaking havoc at the airline’s hubs in Chicago and Dallas and eroding its profits at a time the industry is hurting because of high oil prices and economic worries. Chief Executive Gerard Arpey said the costs to the airline will run into the “tens of millions of dollars” from the disruption of service, but he said American can withstand the loss. The American terminal at O’Hare International Airport was calmer Thursday, despite 124 cancellations, as passengers had more notice and did not show up at the airport to rebook their flights.
Part of the reason for the passengers having more notice and not having to show up in person at the airport may have to do with the special waivers American has issued to travel agents (hey, like me!) to reissue e-tickets onto the next available AA flight without having to park someone on hold for an hour just to get through to an AA res agent empowered to reissue at no cost.
We got empowered today after spending the last two days gradually getting a handle on records on a case by case and then batch basis. Most of the other agents have taken a lot more calls than me; I’ve either been spinning my wheels on international records or been stuck off the phones, rebooking and reissuing records that were identified and put in a queue for batch processing. Tomorrow, even more empowerment goodness; for records that need intervention by an airline rep, we’ll have a more technologically savvy method of getting the records handled.
Meanwhile, I’m praying, literally, for some space to open up on one international record that could have been handled last week, but it was a thing I left undone for too long. My own fault. Also hoping for some space on one record that is the last of 6 that I ended up having to fix, because I made a fare quote error on the first one. It’s all due to inattention and having too many things going on at once. I keep feeling the need to take a break from doing 3 or more things at once.Honestly, this week it feels like I’m losing my mind. The stress isn’t THAT bad, but my brain is toast.
Also: I did a little stylesheet tweaking; the Talian theme has some oddities in the way some things are displayed, and I was finally able to take an hour and make the post title section font a little less freakishly HUGE. Also, the custom field entries – the mood indicator doodad – no longer has a needless border that floats outside of the margins of the entry. I may make the colors paler and less intense, or do something completely different in a week or two.
UPDATE: The space cleared whoohoo!