No, I don't use it.
We only fly about twice a year internationally, and that would be primarily AA to St. Maarten. Having made the trip as often as we have, I usually have a fairly decent sense of when to book and when not to although they've managed to surprise me a few times over the years.
When I booked my April AA flight to SXM for this year, I knew in my heart a late April return wouldn't hold as a n/stop so we recently booked JB for want of a better option. My flight experiences on JB haven't been as good as some here but I definitely like the T5 immigration hall at JFK. And sure enough, the late April AA n/s is not available so I guess it was a good plan.
And an additional thought - we were booked a few years back on AA flights r/t to SXM in Business for our early April trip. All the Business seats were taken and the main cabin was almost completely booked, too. Didn't matter because in the infinite wisdom of the airline they cancelled the n/s completely. We laughed because I received an email notifying us and to our amusement, when I checked the flights and seats they had rebooked us on and in, according to the AA schedule, one of the flights didn't even exist. The good news, however, was not only did they rebook us on better flights that we were able to choose, still in First/Business, but they allowed us to change our departing airport which they generally don't do. I was very happy about that since we were then able to fly out of LGA which is a little closer for us than JFK. And there were no additional costs or fees for the changes even though we now had two flights in those comfy up front seats each way instead of one. I guess they decided that was the price THEY had to pay for their changes to OUR plans. The agent couldn't have been any more helpful and in the end, it really wasn't a big deal.
Last edited by pat; 01/13/2016 01:08 PM.
.
