Don't book your next flight with American Airlines

Well, Heidi and I are back in the US of A after spending almost three weeks in Germany. I'll have some comments as I get time on different stuff in Germany, but for now I want to sound off on the horrible service provided on the ground at Logan by American Airlines. I previously posted about the fun & games we had checking in on our way to Germany. Coming back was even more festive. First the flight crew was delayed getting to the airport in London's Heathrow airport so the flight was delayed by about 30 minutes, no biggie but yet annoying. When we landed in Logan and cleared Passport Control (more on this later) we went to pick up our luggage. Heidi found one of her bags had been mangled and a side pocket had been torn off with many of it's contents missing. Still standing by the luggage carousel Found Priscilla an American Airlines Employee and pointed out the damage. Evidently her job is to discourage people from filing claims of damaged luggage. She told us we could either take everything we had out of the damaged luggage (like we had anywhere to put that stuff) and leave the luggage there and they would "investigate our claim", or we could trudge up to the third floor of terminal E with all our other luggage, and a ride to take us back to Spencer waiting outside, get a receipt and then after we had unpacked in Spencer, bring the piece of luggage back to Logan. Damage to luggage happens, it is a risk of flying, but the airline should make a effort to take care of their customer when this happens. They didn't. After much back and forth they gave me a Fedex account number that I can use to have the luggage picked up, but I still probably have to find a big box to put the luggage in to ship. The whole system was setup to get people to just say forget it and not file a claim. Although the folks up in the air were fine and courteous the treatment on the ground both coming and going has me vowing not to fly American Airlines next time.