American Airlines reviews

Listen up. I had several offers to choose from, but I ended up choosing American Airlines because it was the company I was most excited about post-grad (I was so wrong). AA hired ~20 interns into Division Finance, and gave us some project that was due in 10 weeks. Most of us were bored most of the time because there was simply not enough work that required full attention 40 hrs/week for 10 weeks. I asked several higher-ups if they can give me extra work, all to hear “keep working on your project”. So then we were being paid $23.65 per hour to sit there and pretend we’re busy for 8 hours a day. Excruciating. We were told by full-time analysts that normally every intern gets a return offer if they do a good job on their project and if they make an effort to get to know everyone on the floor. We made tons of friends, attended several coffee chats, etc and upon the final day, exited the office saying “see you next year!”, assuming we’d all come back after graduation. A few weeks after the internship ended, we were all called by our managers saying they have a “headcount issue” and they don’t have enough space to take us back. Seriously??? If you only have capacity for 1-2 total return offers, then don’t hire 20+ interns. What a joke and what a waste of time. In mid-September we see that AA posted a job opening for the SAME POSITION. We all re-applied, hopeful that their headcount issues were sorted out, all to be denied a first-round interview within one week of applying. What’s even more frustrating was seeing a handful of people at my university make it to the finance Superday, which by the way, they said there were more than 30 potential hires that attended the Superday. AA then proceeded to extend 20+ offers to new candidates, which was the same number of interns that didn’t get return offers due to “headcount”. Please, for the sake of your sanity, DO NOT intern at American Airlines. It is a large corporation that views their employees as disposable and will have no problem throwing an entire intern class back into this terrible job market. Speaking for the entire summer intern class of 2023: we really wish we would have chosen to intern at another company, because now we’ve applied to over 500 jobs and heard back from no one. American Airlines wasted our time and they will waste yours too.

The airline is obviously trying to recover its losses from the pandemic, which is understandable but beyond that, it is a clown show on the front lines. Flight crews are overworked, we sit at the airport unpaid for hours, and flights are oversold to the max which makes commuting or even traveling on your time off a complete joke. The flexibility we had in adjusting our schedules on our line months is completely gone as there is very little room for adjustment because the company refuses to adjust the parameters in the system; as such, you are forced to either: call out sick, pay someone to take your trip, or just suck it up and work. Ground crews are constantly chasing metrics, violating contractual and company policy agreements to make it look like we run a smooth operation when we really are not. Management enforces little to no established standards- especially in the uniform department. Their methods of communication are haphazard and inconsistent. The person running the recruiting department for flight attendants is clearly on a mission to hire anyone with a pulse that meets the DEI parameters. Simply put, the impression is they are hiring and training new flight attendants to meet a diversity quota and not really on qualifications/experience and future potential.