A woman says she was wrongfully put on American Airlines’ no-fly list. She cold-emailed the CEO to resolve it.

• Erin Wright was shocked to discover she had been barred from flying American Airlines.

• The airline said she drunkenly “engaged in sexual activity” with a man on a previous flight.

• One problem with that claim: She’s a lesbian. Here’s how Wright fought the ban and won.

Erin Wright was growing anxious.

As she tried to check in for her American Airlines flight on the way to her sister’s bachelorette party, she kept getting an error message, both on her phone and at an airport kiosk. She didn’t have any problems when she booked the ticket, so she assumed it was a system error and went to the airline’s desk to ask for help.

“I’ve flown American a ton,” Wright, a 24-year-old whitewater rafting guide from New Mexico, told Business Insider.

The agents made a phone call to fix the check-in issue, but when they hung up, they told Wright they couldn’t check her in because American Airlines had barred her from flying on its airline.

“I was really confused and then obviously started to tear up a little bit,” Wright said.

She asked the desk agents to tell her why she’d been barred from flying on the airline, but they said they couldn’t. The desk agents told Wright that the staffer on the phone said it was “an issue of internal security” but that Wright should know why she was barred.

“I was like, ‘Well, I don’t, so what do I do?'” Wright said. The agents told her to email the customer-relations department. She did that after booking a last-minute flight on a different airline to make it to her sister’s bachelorette party on time. She said it cost nearly double the $472 flight she booked on American Airlines.

Business Insider has viewed Wright’s emails with the airline. American Airlines did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Ban or spam?

During the ordeal at the airport, Wright recalled an email she received in April that she’d dismissed as spam at the time.

“I got this email from American, but it was from some really random email. It had numbers and letters — a very long, strange email and didn’t have any contact information or anything in the email, either — saying that I was banned,” Wright said. “I hadn’t done anything. I was like, ‘This is just a phishing email.'”

BI has seen the email, which contained the subject line “Permanent Loss of Flight Privileges,” alerting Wright that she’d “violated the passenger code of conduct” during a previous American Airlines flight. The email address included a string of numbers and letters, and the email itself didn’t list a specific allegation.

In the weeks after she was turned away at the airport check-in counter, Wright sent multiple emails to American Airlines, including one threatening legal action.

When she didn’t get responses, she cold-emailed top executives at the company, including CEO Robert Isom, on a Friday afternoon in July.

The next day, she received a full refund for the original flight cost.

By Monday morning, she received an email from a customer-relations employee, who told her that she and a male passenger were “placed on the permanent Internal Refuse List after multiple eye-witness reports of the passengers being intoxicated and engaging in sexual activity” during a flight in February.

Wright confirmed she was on a flight in February, but there was one glaring problem with the airline’s allegation: She’s a lesbian.

“I was like, ‘Well, I definitely didn’t do that, so can we find a way to get this cleared up?'” Wright said. “It’s really hard to prove that it wasn’t me if they think it was, so I just had to try to be as diligent as I could.”

Wright’s appeal to the airline

Emails Wright shared with BI show she was placed on American Airlines’ “internal refuse list,” which the airline can add passengers to at will. It is distinct from the Transportation Security Administration’s No Fly List, a government list of known or suspected terrorists who aren’t allowed to board US flights.

Like all airlines, American Airlines has a Conditions of Carriage contract that passengers agree to abide by when they purchase a ticket. Among the requirements are that passengers “behave appropriately and respectfully with other passengers” and do not “appear intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.”

“We may not let you fly (temporarily or permanently) for any reason,” the airline warns, especially if customers refuse to obey the law or the flight crew.

During and following the COVID-19 pandemic, incidents of violence toward crew members and “unruly passengers” skyrocketed far above prepandemic levels. Airlines also barred thousands of passengers from flying for not wearing masks, though many of those passengers regained their flight privileges once the mask mandate was lifted.

Because Wright was so sure she didn’t do what she was accused of, she said she was even more committed to getting herself off the airline’s “refuse” list. She pulled out all the stops.

“In my email to them, I was literally like, ‘I am a 24-year-old lesbian,” Wright said. “I would never have sexual relations with anybody on a plane but definitely not a man.'”

BI has seen the email, in which Wright said she’s “never been intoxicated on a flight” and is not acquainted with the man the airline accused her of “engaging in sexual activity” with. She said the situation “is definitely a mix-up with another passenger.”

“I could have many people write letters on my behalf confirming that I would never engage in such activities. American Airlines has either mixed me up with another Erin Wright or confused me for another passenger,” she wrote.

In the end, it worked.

“I finally got a call from corporate security saying, ‘We haven’t figured out what happened, but we feel like you’ve been diligent enough in your communication with us and genuine enough that we’re going to take you off the no-fly list until we do figure out what happened. And if it was you, we’ll put you back on it, but if not, you’re not going to hear from us anymore,'” Wright said.

Her story went viral when she shared it on TikTok in August, and many viewers tagged American Airlines, which had only compensated her for the June flight at that point.

“They never offered anything,” Wright said. “In one of my emails, I said, ‘I expect to be compensated for the extra flight I had to book and for the inconvenience that this was.”

The company did not reimburse her further for her trouble.

Read the original article on Business Insider