American Airlines Introducing iMessage Chat Ability

American Airlines has officially launched the ability to chat with reservations agents via iMessage through Apple’s Business Chat platform, allowing you to text back and forth with American representatives via a native iMessage window. This new enhancement will provide a new, easily accessible way to contact American when you need reservation assistance.

New Chat Function

American isn’t the first to introduce this type of customer service interaction. Delta has used this method for quite some time, and Alaska introduced a similar offering within the last couple of years.

While American has offered an in-app chat for a while, the experience is extremely clunky. The chat often times out, and you need to constantly pay attention to your screen to see when an agent replies. There’s no notification when they reply, so it’s a constant battle to keep your screen’s phone on and to look to see if a new message appears. Obviously, especially in the case of irregular operations where you need consistent help, this is less than ideal.

With the new iMessage capability, you can text American directly just like you would with any other friend or family member. The texts will appear like a normal chat on your phone, and you’ll get notified as soon as there’s a reply, just like you do for normal text messages. While there’s still a time limit to stay engaged with the agent, it will be much easier to chat back and forth with the representative in a native text window.

You can use the service for general reservation help, such as ticketing a reservation, changing seats, moving to a new flight, etc. — basically, anything that you can accomplish over the phone. Like with the in-app chat, there’s also select functionality to pay for tickets, so if there’s a difference in fare for a ticket you’re looking to book, the agent will be able to send you a secure form to process that.

To use the chat functionality on your iPhone, long hold over the English reservations number and you’ll be given the functionality to chat.

Final Thoughts

This new iMessage chat function just rolled out this week, and American joins a growing list of other carriers to offer the same capability. It will make contacting a reservations agent much easier, and you no longer need to use the app for getting ahold of someone.