“If I’m going to be dropped off at an airport, I want to be flying in a plane,” Kennedy Woodard, 27, tells PEOPLE about her experience on a Landline connection
Credit: Kennedy Woodard
NEED TO KNOW
- Kennedy Woodard was surpirsed to discover her American Airlines flight was actually a motorcoach ride through the airline’s Landline service
- She says the motorcoach trip took significantly longer than a flight and included assigned seating and limited in-transit amenities
- Woodard claims her booking did not clearly indicate the bus ride, though American Airlines says it discloses the information on its platforms
Kennedy Woodard has taken the flight from South Bend, Ind., to Chicago plenty of times before. She says it’s normally a “quick flight” across state lines — usually only about 40 minutes in the air. But on the 27-year-old operations engineer’s latest work trip to the Hoosier State, she was met with a surprise at the airport gate.
“I’ve done the Chicago to South Bend trip multiple times, and normally I’m at gate three, four or five, but this time, I was at a gate way at the back of the airport,” the Chicago resident tells PEOPLE.
“The seating area was a little bit smaller than the other ones,” she explains. “All of the aspects of a normal gate were there. I didn’t get a view of the door until I was getting ready to board. But that’s when I saw the steps and the bus outside and I knew that was not a bridge leading to a plane.”
Credit: Kennedy Woodard
Woodard says she followed her fellow passengers onto the bus, originally thinking they would board the motorcoach to be transported to an aircraft. But her eyes were raised when American Airlines employees began loading luggage underneath the vehicle.
“Why is our luggage going [under] the bus?” Woodard asks in a March 17 TikTok on her account @thekennedysimone. “Why wouldn’t we just keep it with us while we get on the bus, because we are going to a plane, right?”
The traveler then got on the vehicle and chose a random seat for what she thought was going to be a short ride. However, she quickly realized there were assigned seat numbers in the motorcoach. What Woodard thought was her assigned seat for the plane was actually her assigned seat for the bus.
The next thing she knew, a bus driver adorned in a “construction vest” addressed the passengers before the start of their journey. “He just had a tray of the Biscoff cookies and was like, ‘Hey guys, there’s 40-something of you. We only have about 38 cookies. So who wants a cookie?’” she recalls. “I think at that point, everyone was a little confused, so not a lot of people got cookies.”
She adds, “He didn’t even say, ‘Welcome to Landline’ or anything like that. He literally was just like, ‘I have cookies.’ ”
Once the driver pulled off and the vehicle reached the tarmac security gate, it finally clicked for Woodard — she was on an American Airlines Landline connection.
Credit: American Airlines
According to the airline’s website, the company offers transportation between regional airports and Chicago O’Hare or Philadelphia airports with Landline. “Booked just like any other connecting flight” in the network, they promise “many of the same amenities as a flight.”
For Woodard, she says this mode of transportation was "definitely longer” compared to a flight. She claims the motorcoach ride took two hours and 40 minutes, considering land traffic near Chicago. She does admit her seat was “about the same” size as one in economy.
But what really bothered Woodard about the experience was where she was dropped off. As opposed to the arrivals and departure area, where families and friends could pick up their loved ones, she claims the motorcoach drove onto the tarmac of a gate to disembark.
“We went into the terminal and then had to walk all the way around back to departures,” Woodard says in her TikTok. “Keep in mind it took us like 25 minutes from the point we passed departures to get to the terminal exit — where the planes normally drop you off.”
“If I’m going to be dropped off at an airport, I want to be flying in a plane,” she tells PEOPLE. “Now, if the bus dropped me off in the city center of Chicago, maybe I would actually ride the bus.”
Woodard claims to PEOPLE that nowhere in her booking or confirmation emails did it say that she booked a seat on Landline. In an email shared with PEOPLE sent to Woodard, the text does, in fact, read “check flight status” and includes a symbol of an aircraft.
Credit: Kennedy Woodard
However, she does admit she used her company’s third-party travel agency a couple of days before the trip.
“I’m sure in the fine print they put that it was a bus, but I think if American Airlines is truly thinking about the customer, they would go through the effort to make it abundantly clear every step of the way,” she says.
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In a statement shared with PEOPLE, a representative for American Airlines says the company “does specifically indicate that these are motorcoach segments” through aa.com and the American mobile app. However, “We can’t speak to what third-party flight websites display.”
They add: “These services are designed to help facilitate connecting traffic, not specifically between cities where the service operates. The vast majority of customers on Landline services by American are connecting to and from flights — not solely between the cities operated with Landline or Landline-only itineraries.”
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