Just Don't Book With Them

Our family of 17 adults and 2 children, departing from various cities in the us, traveled to st. Martin for the week between christmas and new year. We all booked with american airlines because it was an "all inclusive" hotel. We all booked our tickets in early 2015 and most of us chose our seats right away. Throughout the interim time period american airlines changed all of our flights a number of times which required contacting their customer service and sitting on hold for long periods of time. Three of us had to change cities of departure due to a move. That change resulted in a $1000/per ticket charge on average. On the day of travel the chaos began. One families flight was cancelled, one persons flight was late for the connecting flight and another couples flight also missed its connecting flight. This resulted in all of those people missing their first night at our resort and having to pay for their own hotel rooms in the city they were stranded in. Rebooking their flights was an absolute nightmare given the poor customer service. On the day of our return to the states, every one of our flights out of st. Martin was two hours late (this may or may not have been aa fault), causing three of our families to spend the night stranded in an airport. Again, rebooking was a nightmare due to customer service. Almost no one in our family made the trip without some breakdown in customer service from aa. We witnessed double bookings of seats, constant overbooking resulting in requesting people to get off the plane and accept vouchers, no food/beverage service on some flights, mechanical problems, no crew to unload a plane that landed at midnight and had to sit on the runway for 30 mins until a crew could finish a previous flight. Our flight captain became so frustrated he requested that we contact their corporate office and complain. Others in our party said their flight attendants requested the same. Just don't book with them. They need to get their act together.