When the ticket scanner turned red as Keith White tried to board his flight from Philadelphia to Dallas, he was surprised.
He'd checked in successfully online the night before, so he assumed it was a glitch, possibly related to his first-class upgrade. But the gate agents seemed flustered.
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WATCH HERE“Then he called the supervisor over, and she relayed that I have a travel block against me and that I could not board that flight. If I needed to get home, it had to be on a different carrier,” said White, remembering that day. “And she said, ‘Somebody will call you.'”
And that's how White, an elite-level member of American Airlines's AAdvantage frequent flyer program, learned he'd made it onto the airline's internal refuse list, meaning he was blocked from flying on any American flight, including the one scheduled to fly him home.
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It was late on a Sunday, so White booked a flight on another airline for the next morning. The $343 expense came out of his pocket, and he spent the night pacing the terminal, worried about the mysterious allegations against him.
Like other air carriers, American Airlines has a list of passengers that it refuses to accept. So, what happened to White is not entirely unheard of, said consumer advocate Chris Elliott.
The correct procedure is for the airline to tell you well in advance that you've been banned," Elliott said. "And to tell you why you've been banned and how you can get off of its no-fly list or its blacklist or whatever it calls it. Every airline has a different name for its list."
White was notified by American Airlines the very next day that his ban was lifted, as he arrived in Dallas on his replacement flight. Months later, he said he still had no idea why he was temporarily blocked.
"I did ask for documentation of what happened, and their response was, it's a legal document, and it would need to be subpoenaed," White said.
White was lucky his ban only lasted a day.
"It's usually a lengthy appeals process," Elliott said. "It takes several weeks. I've seen it take, you know, months in some cases. In some cases even longer than that."
Elliott advises travelers facing similar situations to document everything and persistently contact the airline’s customer service.
“I hear from people who have had this experience, and you can just feel the frustration and you wish that that there was a quick and easy solution for it," Elliott said.
We reached out to American Airlines for an explanation regarding White's temporary ban. However, a spokeswoman was unable to provide specific details.
Elliott warned that getting such answers from what he called the "maddening bureaucracy" within airlines is often frustrating.
"Because an airline really, if it's going to tell you that you've done something wrong, they really should back it up with, at the very least, an incident report or something like that to say, 'OK, here are the witnesses, here are the photos, here's the video,'" Elliott said. "And the airlines don't do that. It's a maddening bureaucracy."
White claimed he never learned who, or what, prompted the allegations against him and decided that pursuing a subpoena wasn't worth the effort.
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