• Erin Wright says she was shocked to find out she was banned from flying American Airlines.
• The airline said she “had sex” with a man on a previous flight.
• One problem with this statement: she is a lesbian. Here’s how Wright fought the ban and won.

Erin Wright was becoming more and more anxious.

While trying to check in for her American Airlines flight for her sister’s bachelorette party, she kept receiving an error message, both on her phone and at a kiosk at the airport . She had no problems booking the ticket, so she assumed it was a system error and went to the airline office to ask for help.

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

The agents made a phone call to resolve the recording problem, but when they hung up, they told Wright they couldn’t record him because American Airlines had banned him from flying on its airline.

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

She asked the office officials to explain why she was banned from flying on the airline, but they said no. Bureau officials also said the staffer on the phone told them it was an “internal security issue” but that Wright should have known why she was banned.

“I thought, ‘Well, I don’t, so what should I do?’” Wright said. The agents told him to email customer relations. She did so after booking a last-minute flight on another airline to get to her sister’s bachelorette party on time. She said it cost nearly double the $471.95 flight she booked on American Airlines.

Business Insider viewed all of 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 then dismissed as spam.

“I got this email from American, but it was from a really random email. It had numbers and letters in it – a really long, weird email and there was no information from contact or anything in the email either – saying I was banned,” Wright said. “I hadn’t done anything. I was like, ‘This is just a phishing email.'”

Business Insider saw the email, which contained the subject line “Permanent loss of flight privileges,” alerting Wright that she had “violated the Passenger Code of Conduct” on a previous American flight Airlines. The email address included a string of numbers and letters, and the email itself contained no specific allegations.

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

When she didn’t receive a response, she cold emailed the company’s top executives, including CEO Robert Isom, on a Friday afternoon in July.

The next day, she received a refund of $471.95 to cover the original cost of the flight.

On Monday morning, she received an email from a customer relations employee, who told her that she and a male passenger had been “placed on the permanent internal denial list after multiple eyewitness reports according to “passengers were intoxicated and engaged in sexual activity” during a flight in February.

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

“I thought, ‘Well, I certainly didn’t do that, so can we find a way to clear things up?'” Wright said. “It’s really hard to prove it wasn’t me if they think it was, so I just had to try to be as diligent as possible.”

Wright’s appeal to the airline

Emails Wright shared with Business Insider show she was placed on American Airlines’ “internal deny list,” to which the airline can add passengers at will. It is distinct from the Transportation Security Administration’s “No Fly List”, which is a list of known or suspected terrorists maintained by the US government.

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

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

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, incidents of violence against crew members and “unruly passengers” climbed well above pre-pandemic levels. Airlines also banned thousands of passengers for not wearing masks, although many of those passengers regained their flying privileges with the airlines once the mask requirement was lifted.

Because Wright was so sure she didn’t do what she was accused of, she said she was even more determined to get rid of the airline’s “denials.” list. She pulled out all the stops.

“In my email, I literally told them, ‘I’m a 24-year-old lesbian,'” Wright said. “I would never have sex with anyone on a plane, but definitely not a man.”

Business Insider saw the emailed appeal to American Airlines in which Wright said she had “never been drunk on a flight” and did not know the man the airline hooked her up with accused of “engaging in sexual activity.” She said the situation “is definitely a mix-up with another passenger.”

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

In the end, it worked.

“I finally got a call from corporate security saying, ‘We don’t understand what happened, but we believe you were diligent enough in your communication with us and sincere enough that we’re going to take you off the list.” -steal the list until we figure out what happened. And if it was you, we’ll put you back on it, but if not, you won’t have any more of our news,'” Wright recalls.

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

“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 the inconvenience that this causes.’

The company did not reimburse him further for his troubles.