AA.com's broken cancel process

I'm writing because the cancel process on AA.com is rather poorly designed and should be fixed.

For years, this has bothered me a bit, but I've mostly addressed with with careful clicking and double-checking. Yesterday (18 May), though, I was in a bit of a rush and made a mistake... resulting in accidentally canceling a reservation and not realizing it until a good bit later.

The cancel process is broken in three ways:

1. "Select" and "cancel" links that are too close to each other
2. Insufficiently detailed feedback during the process
3. Failed (read: broken) feedback after the cancellation.

I will review each in turn, using a dummy booking for DTW-LHR created for this purpose. To be clear: I could have clicked more carefully at step one (and certainly will be, and triple-checking, in the future), but poor design contributed to this problem at all three steps, and it should be fixed.

1. "Select" and "cancel" links that are way too close to each other

There are two places that lists of reservations appear on AA.com. In both places, the select and cancel links are tiny and impossibly close (see screenshots below), makign it very easy to select the wrong reservation to cancel. Simply adding additional padding between each reservation would make it harder to mis-click.

2. Insufficiently detailed feedback during the process

Once you select a "cancel" link, you get a a confirmation screen (below, left). That part is good, and will save someone who meant to click "select" rather than "cancel." But what if you meant to click "cancel," but simply selected the wrong reservation (as I seem to have done)? There's no feedback on this page about which reservation, exactly, you selected -- a major oversight in the page's design.

There is also no feedback about which reservation you have canceled after you confirm your intent to cancel (below, right).

3. Failed (read: broken) feedback after the cancellation.

Worse, after cancelling a reservation, it still appears for quite some time in the lits of reservations as not canceled. So, if you cancel the wrong reservation, go back and look at your reservations, there's no feedback, at all, that you've canceled the wrong reservation, and so no prompt for me to take corrective action.

I found out that I had canceled my reservation by clicking on it to double check the departure time several hours later. I was confused that it came up as canceled and at first thought that it was a glitch; during a panicked midnight call to AA, I was informed that, no, I had canceled the reservation online that afternoon at 3:50p... right around the time that I was canceling another held reservation.

All's okay that ends okay?

During the call, I was first told — twice — that because I had “voluntarily” canceled the flight and not noticed soon enough, the flight could not be reinstated. After explaining these issues, the phone agent tried again and and was able to get the ticket reinstated -- and also tried to get the upgrade back (no avail) and decent seats, which I appreciate. I'm glad that things turned out okay and grateful for the phone agent's help, but I really hope that by pointing out these issues, you can redesign this feature. It seems like a few small changes to this feature would avoid a repeat of somethign that cost me an upgrade, some time, and a bit of stress, and also cost AA some phone time.

Thanks!