This woman got banned from flying with American Airlines for something she didn’t (and would never) do. Here’s why.
“If you’re ever wondering how you can get permanently banned from American Airlines, this is how it happened to me,” Erin Wright (@erin_wright_) starts. Her video now has more than 2.4 million views.
Wright says that in June, she was flying to her sister’s bachelorette party in New Orleans. When she went to check in to her flight on her phone and then at the airport kiosk, she says it wasn’t working.
Starting to worry, Wright says she went to check in with an agent. She recalls the agent also having issues pulling up her info. The agent, Wright says, assured her that it must be a technical error, like maybe she input her birthday wrong. The agent had to place a call regarding the issue, at which point Wright recalls freaking out. Wright was worried she might miss her flight.
And the agent’s reaction didn’t help.
When the agent got off the phone, Wright says the agent looked nervous. The agent, Wright recalls, informed Wright that she was banned from flying with American Airlines.
“‘I’m really sorry. It’s an issue of internal security. I can’t tell you. But the person on the phone told me that you should know why,’” Wright recalls the agent saying.
The reason for the ban
Wright says she called customer service, as instructed, to try to get the issue fixed ASAP. But, she adds, they couldn’t help either and instructed her to call customer relations (a separate department). The thing is, she says that team could only be reached via email.
“I’m realizing that I’m going to miss my flight, and I just need to book another flight,” Wright says.
“So I quickly booked myself another $1,000 round-trip flight day,” Wright says, expecting American to reimburse her for the issue.
Wright says she had to wait eight more hours for her new flight. And, during that time, in between crying on the phone with her mom, she says she reached out to customer relations to find out why she was banned. She also says she requested a refund for her missed flight and additional expenses.
She says customer service finally replied. But, she says, they couldn’t tell her why she was banned and needed to pass her off to corporate security.
“I finally get an email from corporate security saying that I have been banned because I was having sexual relations with a man on a flight while intoxicated,” Wright recalls.
The kicker
“I am a 24-year-old lesbian. You see me. Am I having sexual relations with any man? No,” Wright tells viewers.
Wright notes it took 12 days to get to this point. And now, she says, she was told she needed to go through an official appeal process. Two months later, she says still hadn’t heard anything. At that point, Wright says her mom stepped in to help and reached out to American’s law department. That got Wright’s case moving within two days.
The security team, according to Wright, let her know she’s off the list for now. She says she was only refunded for $400 of other missed flight. She says she also wasn’t refunded the extra $1,000 she had to spend, “even though it was their fault.”
Wright asks people to blow up the video so she could at least earn money on TikTok from the views. Well, TikTok did as TikTok does and got her hundreds of thousands of views, resulting in about $1,008 in earnings. That’s almost exactly how much Wright paid for the replacement flight, she shares.
“I’m just really grateful for all your help and for blowing that video up because it took a lot of stress off of me financially,” Wright says.
@erin_wright_ Thanks for being the worst @American Airlines #storytime #funnystory #funnyvideos #airlinetiktok #airplanestory #funny #fyp ♬ original sound – Erin Wright
In a follow-up video, Wright says, “It was a super upsetting experience. And American Airlines didn’t compensate me for the inconvenience or the extra flight that I had to book because of their error.”
She adds that she’s still hoping American Airlines will rectify the situation and has reached out to it. But she says that she may take commenters’ suggestions of filing a complaint with the Department of Transportation or suing American in small claims court.
The 2 types of no-fly lists
In case you need to know for the future (maybe you’ll have your own jumbled situation), there are two types of no-fly lists. There’s the one run by individual airlines and then the official federal one.
Airlines have the right to ban a passenger from flying with them. And it’s usually because a passenger was unruly on a flight. Now, unruly can mean a lot of things: getting too drunk, trying to assault a flight attendant, and seemingly reaching the mile-high club. But, just because a person gets put on one airline’s list, it doesn’t mean they’ll make it to the list of another airline.
The only way to get universally banned from multiple airlines is to make it onto the official no-fly list. This list is managed by the FBI and prohibits a person from boarding an aircraft “flying within, to, from, and over the United States,” according to the TSA website. Getting on the federal no-fly list is not quite that simple. As of right now, that list is only made up of people involved in or suspected of involvement in terrorism or related activities.
The Daily Dot reached out to Wright and American Airlines for comment via email.
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