Traveling is stressful enough. There’s the packing, the drive to the airport, the collecting of boarding passes through a kiosk or service desk, the mad dash through security and then the “hurry up and wait” atmosphere of boarding a plane. For one TikTok user named Erin Wright, what was supposed to be a straightforward trip to her sister’s bachelorette party turned into something else altogether.
That something? She was banned for life from American Airlines for having sex with a man on the plane. The problem? Wright is a lesbian and was obviously the victim of mistaken identity. Read on to find out how it all went down, and how the situation was (kind of) resolved.
Wright didn’t even find out she was banned from flying American Airlines until she talked to someone from the airline. She had just taken a two-hour drive to the Albuquerque airport and tried to check in on her phone but she kept getting an error message. No big deal, she thought, and “assumed it was just glitching.” After all, something like this “had never really happened” to her before, so she figured she would just get it sorted when she got to the airport.
When she went to the kiosk to print out a boarding pass, she got a different error message, one she had “never seen before.” She still wasn’t concerned though, because never in her wildest dreams would she assume she was banned from flying the airline. Her next move was to talk to someone at the counter. When she did, she “asked them to check me in” and she said at that point they were still all being “very nice.”
When the person at the counter was also met with an error message, they said it was no reason for concern. “Don’t even worry you probably put your name or your birthday in wrong,” she said they told her. The attendant then got on the phone for “probably ten minutes. I’m freaking out at this point I’m like ‘I’m probably going to miss my flight.’” When the lady at the counter got off the phone, “she looked nervous.”
The lady apologized to Wright and told her she was “banned from flying American Airlines.” You can imagine Wright’s shock considering this “ban” came out of nowhere and she wasn’t even notified about it. “What did I get banned for? Can you tell me?” she asked the woman. The woman said it was an “internal security issue” but that Wright should “know why” she was banned. She did not.
Wright started to cry and was told to call customer service. She could tell the woman at the counter felt bad for her, but not enough to tell her what was going on. When she called customer service, they weren’t much more help, Wright didn’t have any options and she was going to miss her sister’s party, so she had to buy another ticket from another airline – a move that cost her a whopping $1,000.
Her best guess for what was wrong was that she was maybe put on the federal no-fly list, but that theory was quickly disproved. “I was really nervous when I bought my other flight because I didn’t know if I was actually unable to fly all airlines,” Wright told The Advocate. “And since I had been able to book on American Airlines being banned, maybe I could also book on another one and also be unable to go on that airline. So, my panic about getting to my sister’s bachelorette party didn’t really go away until I got through TSA.” Then she had an 8-hour wait for her next flight, so she emailed customer relations to try and get her money back – which was $1,400 at this point including her original ticket for American. After being sent through “the craziest loopholes,” Wright finally got an email back from corporate security.
They told Wright that she had been banned because she was having “sexual relations with a man on a flight while intoxicated.” The problem with that story? Wright is a self-described “24-year-old lesbian.” This exchange took 12 days of back and forth, by the way.
She told corporate security that obviously this wasn’t her, so can they remove her ban and reimburse her because she was out such a large amount of cash. Security told her she needed to file an appeal to get the case moving forward. “I don’t know how to prove it wasn’t me except I’m literally a lesbian,” she said in the email. “I can get you letters from people telling you that that’s the truth.”
This whole fiasco started in June, and corporate security just stopped responding to her. She tried all kinds of things to get the attention of the airline, including finding “the emails for the directors of three different departments at American Airlines.” Still nothing. Wright’s mother then got involved and “had her lawyer send a letter to the legal department, and that’s the only time that I actually ended up hearing back from them,” she said, adding that if she hadn’t pushed harder she doesn’t think anything would have happened.
Eventually, they contacted her and said they were going to take her off the no-fly list but that they could still “reverse this and put you back on the ban” if it ends up being her. As for what really happened, despite her desire to know, the airline couldn’t tell her anything because it then became a privacy issue for the actual couple involved.
So what happens now? Wright said she’s going to file a complaint with the Department of Transportation because of how hard it was to get them to talk.
“I really just want American Airlines to take responsibility for it. They haven’t even sent an e-mail apologizing for the huge inconvenience that it was,” Wright told The Advocate. “I’m hoping that the Department of Transportation will just look into it and look into what I went through, and maybe require some sort of change in the way that they go about their permanent bans.”
The video, by the way, has more than three million views and Wright said it helped her make back her money so that she didn’t even need the airline to pay.