American Airlines Has a New Acronym. Guess Who It is For.

If you watched Aluminum Lady’s video (embedded below) on Me@Work, American’s new flight attendant scoring system, you already know where this is going.

This week, American followed up the scorecard with a pep talk.

In a memo circulated to flight attendants, Vice President of Inflight Bobbi Wells introduced CARES, the company’s new customer service framework. CARES stands for Considerate, Authentic, Reliable, Elevated, and Safe. For flight attendants, it comes with three action words: Greet, Recognize, Engage. Welcome and thank every customer. Recognize premium cabin customers by name, along with ConciergeKey and Executive Platinum members seated in the main cabin. Create “moments that matter.”

Link: Read Aluminum Lady's version of the "CARES" memo

The memo is warm. It tells flight attendants that no one spends more time with customers than they do, that no one has a bigger impact on the journey. It says that once the aircraft door closes, “it’s often up to you to make magic happen.” It promises a Crew CARES video series and a Moments that Matter newsletter. It closes by thanking flight attendants for everything they do.

Read on its own, it’s a nice note. Read next to everything else happening at American right now, it’s something else. It’s the company quietly handing the turnaround to the people in the galley.

The scorecard behind the pep talk

CARES did not arrive alone. It arrived a few months after Me@Work, the performance platform American rolled out in April. According to the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the union representing American’s flight attendants, Me@Work compiles a year of data on each individual flight attendant and generates a score. Newsweek reports the inputs include passenger satisfaction surveys, attendance records, operational performance measures, flight-attendant-related delays, compliance with company procedures, Microsoft Teams usage, electronic flight bag compliance, and the timeliness of incident reports.

American has told the union that Me@Work is an informational and developmental tool, not a disciplinary one. That’s the company’s position and it deserves to be stated plainly. The union is skeptical. APFA says management has been compiling data on individual flight attendants without giving them the ability to see it, verify it, correct it, or challenge it. In California, that skepticism has legal weight, since state privacy law gives workers rights to know about and correct data collected on them. No regulator has found a violation. The questions are open.

So here is the pairing. A framework that defines what great service looks like, and a system that scores each flight attendant against it, fed partly by passenger surveys. Passenger surveys that, as critics note, sour when the flight is late, the Wi-Fi is down, the catering is short, or the plane is grubby. None of which the flight attendant controls.

Which brings us to what management controls.

The numbers nobody puts in a memo

American reported net income of $111 million for 2025. That’s not a typo missing some zeros. Delta earned roughly $5 billion the same year. United earned about $3.4 billion. American’s profit fell 87 percent from the year before, on record revenue of $54.6 billion. As Live and Let’s Fly calculated it, for every billion dollars of revenue, American produced about $2 million of profit. Delta produced about $79 million.

Flight attendants did not do that. Flight attendants also did not do the following, all of which shows up in Department of Transportation data for 2025 and 2026:

American mishandled 0.66 bags per 100 checked in 2025, well above the industry average of 0.52 and second worst among the major network carriers. In May 2026, American drew more consumer complaints filed with the DOT than any other airline, 1,181 of them, compared with 744 for United and 705 for Delta. American is a big airline and raw complaint counts favor small ones, so that context matters. It’s still more. The airline also posted the highest cancellation rate among the major networks in 2025, according to reporting on the DOT figures, and its economy product scored below average in J.D. Power’s 2026 satisfaction study.

And in late 2024, the DOT hit American with a record $50 million fine over its handling of wheelchairs and mobility aids. The department found American mishandled more than 10,760 wheelchairs and scooters between 2019 and 2023, and that in some cases passengers were injured.

What happened next tells you how American’s management prefers to fix problems. That December, the DOT finalized a rule requiring airlines to provide dignified assistance to disabled passengers, train the workers who help them annually, supply loaner wheelchairs, and return mobility devices in the condition they received them. Two months later, in February 2025, American joined Delta, United, Southwest, and JetBlue, through their trade group Airlines for America, in suing to strike the rule down, arguing the DOT had exceeded its authority. A4A says the airlines remain dedicated to accessibility and are challenging only certain provisions, not the whole rule. The current DOT has since walked back parts of it anyway, a retreat that followed the lawsuit. So four months after paying a record fine for mishandling disabled passengers, American went to court to narrow the protections written in response. Not fixing the problem. Fixing the rules.

Bags, cancellations, wheelchairs, fines. These are systems, staffing, investment, and litigation decisions. And here’s the thing about hospitality: it multiplies, it doesn’t repair. Delta’s flight attendants earn real credit for that airline’s reputation, but they’re building on flights that leave on time with the bags aboard. Warmth on top of a working operation is a premium product. Warmth on top of a broken one is damage control. No amount of cheer at row 12 reunites a bag with its owner or un-cancels a flight. A flight attendant greeting an Executive Platinum by name fixes none of this.

How American got here: a decade of chasing the wrong customer

The deeper problem isn’t this year’s numbers. It’s that American has spent roughly a decade lurching between strategies while Delta and United picked one and executed.

Start in 2017. American, along with the other legacy carriers, rolled out basic economy, a fare product The Points Guy describes as originally designed to compete with ultra-low-cost carriers. American didn’t stop at the fare. It went after the whole aesthetic. Under an internal program called Project Oasis, American densified its narrowbody fleet: thinner seats with less padding, a reduced seat pitch, lavatories shrunk to 24 inches wall to wall, and seatback entertainment screens ripped out entirely, some of them nearly new. Boeing 737s that once held 150 seats came out of the shop holding 172. Simple Flying notes the whole exercise began because American decided it needed to compete with carriers like Spirit and Frontier, and that Delta and United made the opposite call, adding seatback screens while American removed them.

So American spent years building a Spirit-shaped product inside a legacy-carrier cost structure. Passengers noticed.

Then came the distribution experiment. In 2022 and 2023, chief commercial officer Vasu Raja pushed a “modern retailing” strategy that steered customers away from travel agencies and corporate booking channels toward American’s own website and app. Corporate travel managers hated it, corporate revenue lagged Delta and United, and in May 2024 American cut its revenue and profit forecast, sending the stock down 13 percent in a day. Bloomberg reported that CEO Robert Isom fired Raja after a Bain & Company review found the strategy was alienating corporate clients. Isom conceded the airline had “regrets” about the execution and slashed its planned growth for the rest of the year.

Having chased the Spirit customer and then chased away the corporate customer, American announced its next move in December 2025: luxury. Reuters described a “customer reimagination” plan built on privacy suites, Bollinger champagne, faster Wi-Fi, bigger lounges, and richer loyalty perks, an explicit effort to claw back ground lost to Delta and United. The trouble with the plan is contained in that last clause. Delta and United had been building their premium businesses for years by then. United’s premium cabin revenue grew 11 percent in 2025 while its economy segments shrank. American is arriving at the premium party late, out of breath, and asking who moved the bar.

None of these pivots were designed in a galley.

Meanwhile, in the cabin

While the strategy wandered, the front line got more supervision. In June 2025, Wells implemented a systemwide restructuring of inflight management, described at the time as a way to give flight attendants more support. APFA’s assessment, published this month, is blunter: the union says the new structure has produced an unhealthy obsession with disciplining flight attendants instead of addressing management’s own shortcomings, and asks why nearly every interaction has become an investigation. Paddle Your Own Kanoo reported that in Dallas, managers pulling crews off trips for meetings and investigations blocked 1,128 days of crew flying in a single month, contributing to the delays the scoring system then measures.

Sit with that loop for a second. Management’s oversight process removes crews from flying. Flights get harder to staff and delays follow. Delays feed passenger dissatisfaction. Passenger dissatisfaction feeds the surveys. The surveys feed each flight attendant’s score.

By February 2026, both the flight attendants’ union and the pilots’ union had voted no confidence in Isom’s leadership, with APFA’s board citing abysmal profits, operational failures that left crews sleeping on airport floors, declining customer satisfaction, and rising executive pay. The vote was unanimous, a first in the union’s history.

Five months later, the answer arrived. It was an acronym.

The pattern, and why it’s worth learning

Here’s the move, and once you see it you’ll see it everywhere, not just at airlines. Management makes a series of strategic bets. The bets go bad. The gap between the company and its competitors becomes impossible to hide from investors. And instead of a reckoning over the decisions, the company announces elevated expectations for the front line, wrapped in language about how much the front line matters.

The memo even says the quiet part: once the door closes, it’s up to you. That’s true in the narrow sense, and it’s exactly the problem in the broad one. Flight attendants can be considerate, authentic, reliable, elevated, and safe on every flight, and American will still trail Delta by billions, because flight attendants don’t negotiate catering contracts, design seat maps, run baggage systems, set schedules, or fire chief commercial officers.

To be fair to the memo, nothing in CARES itself is objectionable. Greeting people is good. Recognizing a loyal customer by name is a genuinely nice touch, and flight attendants, who are safety professionals first and have been advocating for passengers all along, didn’t need a framework to know that. But think about where those moments actually happen. Every upstream failure lands in the cabin. The delayed flight, the missing bag, the dead Wi-Fi, the thin catering all board the plane as somebody’s mood, and the flight attendant is the person standing in front of it for the next three hours. They absorb the frustration American’s systems created, work to turn it around anyway, and then get scored on how the passenger felt about the flight. The environment is stacked against them before the first greeting leaves their mouth. The objection is to the arithmetic: a warm memo plus an individual scoring system plus a management structure the union says is built around discipline adds up to accountability flowing in exactly one direction. Downhill.

What you can actually do with this

Mostly: recognize it. That’s not nothing. It’s the whole game.

The next time a company that’s trailing its industry announces a new service framework for its lowest-paid customer-facing workers, ask what the executives did in the three years before the acronym showed up. The answer is usually the real story. At American, the answer is a decade of strategy whiplash, a fired commercial chief, a record disability fine, and a profit line that rounds to zero next to Delta’s.

If you fly American, remember that the person handing you a drink is being scored partly on how you feel about a flight they didn’t schedule, on a plane they didn’t configure, run by executives they’ve formally declared no confidence in. If something goes wrong, aim your feedback where the decisions get made. APFA is asking for something modest and reasonable: that flight attendants be allowed to see, verify, and challenge the data being collected about them. You can follow the union’s updates at apfa.org and watch whether American’s “developmental tool” stays developmental.

And when the Crew CARES video series starts rolling out, watch it the way you’d watch anything at American these days. Considerately. Authentically. With one eye on the scoreboard behind the curtain.

Sources

1. Memo circulated to American Airlines flight attendants introducing the CARES framework, July 2026 (on file)
2. American Airlines Employee Scoring Sparks Privacy Concerns in California — Newsweek, Amanda Greenwood, July 23, 2026
3. Oppressive new ranking for flight attendants hits turbulence in California — CA Post via Yahoo News, July 2026
4. Sad: American Airlines Profits Down 87%, As CEO Promises “Significant Upside” — One Mile at a Time, January 2026
5. American’s 2025 Earnings Look Awful Next To Delta And United — Live and Let’s Fly, February 2026
6. American Airlines Profit Falls 87% in 2025 as Costs Rise — Aviation A2Z, January 27, 2026
7. The Worst Airlines in America, Ranked — Based on the Data — TravelPirates, July 2026 (compiling DOT Air Travel Consumer Report and J.D. Power 2026 data)
8. American Airlines Might Finally Be Losing Less Checked Bags Than Before — Paddle Your Own Kanoo, April 19, 2025
9. US fines American Airlines $50M over mishandling disabled passengers, wheelchairs — Associated Press, October 2024
10. Airlines push back on new federal protections for passengers with disabilities — GBH News, February 21, 2025
11. U.S. passengers flying with wheelchairs will now have even less support against airlines — Yahoo News, September 30, 2025
12. American Airlines shares tumble 13% after sales strategy backfires; carrier cuts growth — CNBC, Leslie Josephs, May 2024
13. American Air Fired Commercial Head After Sales Strategy Alienated Corporate Clients — Bloomberg, May 2024
14. Industry Reacts to American’s ‘Regret,’ Raja’s Departure — Business Travel News, Donna M. Airoldi, May 30, 2024
15. American Airlines ramps up premium upgrades to regain ground on Delta, United — Reuters, December 17, 2025 (via MarketScreener)
16. Why In the World Is American Airlines Getting Rid Of Seatback Screens? — Simple Flying, August 2025
17. AA Confirms Project Oasis First Class Improvements — The Points Guy
18. American Basic Economy Seat Selection — The Points Guy
19. The Great Divide: United Airlines’ Premium Pivot Smothers Economy Woes in Record Earnings — MarketMinute, January 23, 2026
20. American Airlines Faces Flight Delays in Dallas After Managers Blocked 1,128 Days of Crew Flying in a Single Month — Paddle Your Own Kanoo, July 18, 2026
21. The Operational Cost of AA’s Micromanagement — APFA, July 21, 2026
22. American Airlines flight attendants, pilots want leadership change — NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, February 2026