A warning to all food allergy passengers who are considering flying American Airlines (AA). We flew back from LA last week, 9/29/2023. We booked with British Airways(BA) and via the One World Alliance and due to codesharing were put onto an American Airlines flight for return. My daughters both have nut allergies (and one also has Sesame Allergy). We fly BA regularly with no issue and great support from the flight crews.
AA wanted initially to remove us from the flight before takeoff, then realising the delay involved in having us removed they reluctantly made a local area announcement to passengers that my daughters were on the flight in Economy (pointing out where we were) telling anyone not sat near us that it wouldn’t affect them.
The flight crew then proceeded to serve a bag of nuts to every passenger for breakfast, including to my daughters! Other supportive passengers tried to hand them back to the flight crew at which point we overheard one air hostess say “I can’t deal with this, it’s only small keep it”. When my daughter tried to address the implications of anaphylaxis with the flight attendant she told my daughter, “You should never be allowed to fly on a commercial airline.” This sent my daughter into understandable distress.
I tried to privately reason with the flight attendant who then told me the whole crew had had enough of us and to drop it otherwise police would be waiting for us at Heathrow!! We were shocked and disgusted by the discriminatory attitude and lack of customer service. We recognise that we don’t live in a nut free world, we carry Epipens of course, bring our own food on board flights to reduce risks and take all other precautions we can. It was just blatantly clear the American Airlines crew were annoyed that we were there and wanted to do all they could to make us feel unsafe and unwelcome.
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