A woman was left mortified after she found out she was banned from flying when trying to check in for her flight – due to no fault of her own
A woman was left mortified after a mistaken identity saw her banned from boarding an airplane after she was accused of being on the mile-high list.
Erin Wright was getting ready to board the plane for her sister’s hen do in New Orleans when she was unable to check in for her flight – only to be told she was actually banned from American Airlines and had been put on a no-fly list, but not the reason why.
The 24-year-old documented her ordeal on TikTok as she explained how she was wrongly mistaken for someone else who’d had quite the frisky flight previously.
“I just went to the help desk from American Airlines and asked them to check me in and they were really nice,” she explained. “So they go to check-in and it errors for them too. They’re like, ‘Oh don’t even worry. You probably just put your name or your birthday in wrong when you were entering your information when you bought the flight. Let us call someone and get it fixed.'”
However, she then realised it wasn’t as simple as entering her name or date of birth wrong, as she said the woman at the help desk broke the news to her that she had been banned from flying. Left confused over why she would be banned, she was then told they weren’t allowed to tell her why.
When she called customer services to try and get to the bottom of it, she was bluntly told it was an issue of “internal security” and frustrated that they couldn’t tell her, despite the issue being about her. Erin was forced to rebook another flight which set her back $1,000 (£760) for a round-trip, on the day of flying.
She then explained in her TikTok video that she finally found out the reason for being banned after she had reached out to American Airlines’ corporate security. She said: “I have been banned because I was having sexual relations with a man on a flight while intoxicated,” and added: “Let me tell you, I am a 24-year-old lesbian. Do you see me? Am I having sexual relations with any man?”
She told the customer relations they had the wrong passenger, but claimed it took 12 days of “numerous emails” to fix the issue and was then told to send an official appeal and detail “exactly why I didn’t do it”.
“So I email them a very serious email, but also somewhat funny because in it I’m like, I don’t really know how to prove that it wasn’t me except for the fact that I’m literally a lesbian and I can, like, get you letters from other people telling you that that’s the truth,” she said, and shared that it took months and many emails to the airline’s legal department before she heard back.
When she finally got a response, Erin recalled: “I get a call from someone, some guy being like, ‘Hey, we’ve reviewed your case and we’ve determined that it most likely was not you. So we’re going to take you off the no-fly list until further notice until we either figure out whether it was actually you or someone else.
“I asked if they could call me back and tell me what happened once they figure out how I ended up on the no-fly list and they told me no, because it would be confidential at that point if it wasn’t actually me.”
Erin then followed up in the comments section of her video and said: “When they called to tell me they were taking me off the no-fly list they said, ‘I hope this wasn’t too much of an inconvenience’.”
The Mirror have approached American Airlines for a comment
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