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A three hour tour
A Delta Airlines customer service person wrote back to me today apologizing for my “bad experience” with flight delays and cancellations last month.
She offered me $50 towards the price of new tickets to make up for my “unsatisfactory experience”.
She also said “For future reference, if the purpose of your
trip is time sensitive you may want to allow a little extra leeway.”
So, I wrote back:
Dear xxxxx,
Thank you for replying, although I had indicated I did not need a response.
I do not think I had made myself clear.
You said in your email below “For future reference, if the purpose of your
trip is time sensitive you may want to allow a little extra leeway.”
I left 47 hours for a flight that usually takes 3. That’s 44 extra hours I left for my “time sensitive event”. Driving the distance would only take 20 hours. Your airline tells me that I should have left 27 hours more then what it would take me to drive the distance in order to be sure I’d get there.
Your airline provides the same basic service as a taxi cab. If I call for a cab and it shows up a short time late due to traffic or weather, that is acceptable. If it shows up two days late and tells me I should have planned for that, it is not acceptable.
Any airline that tells me that I should leave more than 2 days leeway in my travel plans in order to make it to my events is not an airline I can depend on.
If I can’t depend on you, then I am not going to trust you with my travel plans.
Your email only confirms what I found to be a problem with your company.
Thank you for the offer of discount vouchers. I have erased them as I have no intention of using your airline again and they are therefore useless to me.
Frank Hunt
I know, I know, it was a form letter and I shouldn’t get mad about it.
But, we weren’t talking about being 2 hours late. They were 2 whole days late and told me I should have “allowed a little extra leeway”.
That’s just stupid.
There is no way 2 days counts as “a little extra leeway” for a 3 hour trip unless you’re talking Gilligan’s Island.
(I can’t get the image of Skipper telling Mr. Howell “you should have left a ‘little extra leeway’ in your plans for your boat tour, don’t get mad at me we’re shipwrecked” out of my head when dealing with these Delta people.)
It does annoy me that they sent me the vouchers for plane travel. I didn’t send them my comments in an attempt to get discount travel in the future. I did it to explain why I wasn’t going to use them in the future.
To me it sounds like “give him some money and he’ll shut up” instead of “we really let a customer down.”
Just to do a comparison between them and taxi cabs, I looked up the cost for taking a taxi to Orlando.
Boston cabs charge $2.80 a mile. It is 1288 miles. So, that’s $3606.40 each way, while Delta was about $300 round trip.
The upshot is I shouldn’t compare them. Airlines just aren’t even in the same league as cabs…
Finally, in case you think I just enjoy complaining to people, I wrote complimentary letters to SouthWest Airlines and the Albany airport thanking both of them for doing a great job and telling them both that they’d be high on my list for future plans.
I don’t like complaining. I do like giving feedback to people.
I think if people do an exceptional job, good or bad, they need to know that.
I’d be happier all around if it was always good.
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I think you're right, "If we give them discounts or partially what they 'demand' or think they 'deserve' from us as retribution, they'll fly with us again" seems to be their mentality.
And, they're also expecting the "Oh, but Frank, don't you see they're trying to be nice to you and give you free/$50 ticket*, you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds"
* - $50 out of a $300 ticket doesn't sound like a bargain. I bet $50 doesn't even cover 10 pounds of aviation fuel or 30 minutes of maintenance.
I bet SouthWest and Albany were not expecting a complimentary letter from you, hopefully that means volumes to them as opposed to Delta.
Speaking of SW - along with Brickhousewench, I think part of SW's success story is they've come to the harsh reality that airlines are really taxicabs/buses with wings, and only to transport people from A to B (or in many ways, A to B to C back to B, to C again then to D to...)
And people who ride taxis and buses are numbers of people, not individuals with needs/entitlements, it's a business transaction - you pay for someone else to transport you somewhere.
it's simple and rugged, but it's reality.
In the end, I still agree that Delta really could have done better, but appear to have been to full of themselves, and in the mentality too of "Not My Job". Airlines cancel flights, airports shut down, oh well, no longer Delta's problem.
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