Monthly Archives: July 2008

This story does not end well. In fact, for all I know, it doesn’t even end.

We, family of four, arrived at Manchester Airport a good two and a half hours before our flight, which was due to depart at 11:55. There was a considerable queue even then, but it was making steady progress, and during the half hour or so it took us to get to the front of it, we endured being asked first basic security questions, then having our carry-on bags individually tagged with security flimsies, then having the usual pointless questions about who packed our bags, whether they ever escaped, and a command recitation of all our electrical gear. This concluded with ‘Mike’ the security guy taking our passports away and tapping stuff on a laptop for a long time. Then he, as he had promised, brought them back.

Eventually we made it to check-in. And this is where the real trouble started. I never like it when the ticket clerks stop looking bored and start looking like they are concentrating, and this fellow was definitely concentrating. For some reason, all the luggage tags were coming up in my son’s name, and only one boarding pass would print. He checked the printer. He did a tappety-tap routine on the keyboard. He consulted with the silver-haired gentleman on the left, and then the young lady on the right. The codes just were not right on the tickets and he didn’t know how to fix it. Sorry, he said at last, but you’ll have to go over there to the ticket desk.

It’s now about two hours before flight time, there’s no queue at the ticket desk, I’m holding a little piece of paper that Delta printed out for me during our outbound kerfuffle which shows our four return tickets as “Confirmed”. What can go wrong?

Lots.

The lady at the ticket counter was not wearing a name tag, just an Air France pin, so I cannot alas report her name, but she wasted little time in getting to the point: we didn’t have tickets. Or, rather, my 14 year old son had a ticket, but the other three e-tickets we were relying on to fly home with had been refunded. They were gone. And the plane was full anyway. It was clear from her manner that she was entirely open to the possibility that we had somehow tried to do something underhanded (pocket the money?) and then put one over Delta Airlines. We explained the saga of our outbound flight, and she put in a call to some office somewhere who were, she asserted, the only people who could figure out what had happened (she didn’t say ‘and make it right’). No one in the airport had the authority to do anything. So she called Fares. Long wait. No joy. She called Global Assistance. There was another long round of holding during which she told me to just wait. We were told that the flight would close an hour before departure, and the minutes continued to tick by while the anonymous lady, secure in her disempowerment, displayed no sign of urgency or even concern about our predicament. Our request to see a supervisor were at first not even acknowledged, then we were told there was none, only a manager, and he was off at the gate doing operations and thus unavailable. Take that, worm. (No she didn’t say it – in words.)

The hour came and went. Eventually – after it was too late to do us any good – the matter was kicked upstairs to “Jen” who apparently actually works for Delta instead of for whoever it is who runs the front line that Delta relies on to deal with customers. By the time matters got to Jen, it seemed to have dawned on Delta as a corporate entity that we had not in fact engaged in a scheme to embezzle, nor sold our tickets for a side jaunt to Fiji while abandoning a child to fly as an unaccompanied minor to a city where there would be no one to collect him. Jen was in fact very sympathetic. But at that point there was little she could do. Not only was it too late to get us on our original flight, but there were basically no other flights out of Manchester which would get us to Miami today. And even if there were such a flight, they did not as yet have whatever it was they needed to actually issue us a ticket. Jen went off to the back to make phone calls in the hope of resurrecting our tickets, a process that consumed more than another hour.

Meanwhile, I’m standing at the counter, resisting offers to go sit at the corner as there is no longer anyone waiting to be helped (no more flights, remember?). Every so often another member of staff comes out from the back with a progress report which consists of “she’s still on the phone.”

Eventually Jen is off the phone. It’s now going on to about 12:30. They are prepared to rebook us on a new flight once they have recreated our tickets. Alas, they haven’t yet actually succeeded in producing tickets for us, and the only flight left today would be from Paris at 5pm. And even if they could get us to Paris by 5, there are no seats on the flight. So we’re stuck. Bonus day in Manchester (with our bags, but without much in the way of clean laundry), they’ll provide a hotel, just hold on while they check if there are rooms…

Half an hour later there are rooms, comped meals, but as yet no tickets. I’m prepared to stay there until we get them or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first, but “Declan F.” the supervisor is now to hand, full of beautiful promises of tickets in the morning presented in an Irish accent, even an invocation of the Deity, and Caroline decides to believe him. So we check into the airport hotel, endure some more confusion (our names have become quite garbled in the transition), and have to be back at the ticket counter at 9am tomorrow.

For what it’s worth, Jen and Declan have a theory as to what happened. In the first installment of how badly things have gone with Delta, I explained how Delta had mechanical problems and rebooked us on BA,

… we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I’m given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she’s the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there’s no Andrea. She’s going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don’t need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don’t have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

Jen and Declan say that they think that the lady who first booked us on BA tried to rebook our e-ticket using some e-ticket related tie-up between Delta and BA. If she’d done it right, I would not have needed the fabulous FIM. But perhaps she didn’t do it quite right, and as a result the BA people couldn’t see the ticket, leading them to demand the paper FIM. The Delta guy who created the FIM worked off a record that had already been modified, so even if he knew what he was doing it might all have been doomed by then, and he may well not have known what he was doing either. In any case, their guess is that at some point along the way, our return tickets (well, three out of four anyway) were paid over to BA as well as our outgoing tickets. That was wrong, and Delta’s fault rather than ours. Certainly Occam’s razor suggests that the screwup happened in MIA when we were re-routed. But if you ask me, the system did not fail well.

Did I mention that tomorrow’s plane was 10 people over booked before the nice folks in Manchester added the four of us to the passenger list?

I have a lifetime gold card on American Airlines. They’re not perfect, but they have never canceled a ticket of mine with no warning or reason.. Delta was noticeably cheaper for this flight than American, and four times noticeably adds up to appreciably. But I think I’ll be willing to pay a significant premium to fly AA next time.

And I really have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow morning. (But hey, Delta, if you're reading, how about business class?)

I'm happy to read that my friend Ann Bartow had a True and Amazing Travel Experience.

I just had a travel experience too, but it was not quite as nice. We are heading back to the US today, so perhaps this is a good time to tell the story of our outbound journey.

Our saga begins in Miami last week, on Tuesday afternoon. The four of us are waiting for the 4:15 pm Delta flight to Atlanta, which will connect us to our flight to Manchester, UK.

Gate staff announce that we have problems. Two of them. The first is that the radar is not working. The second is that the weather is bad in Atlanta, and there may be air traffic control issues. But not to worry, the necessary part is on its way on the next flight from Atlanta, and is expected to arrive at 5:30. Meanwhile, we are instructed to sit tight, there's no need to rebook anything.

Being long-legged, travel-experienced, and able to do simple arithmetic, I am third in line to the counter as I figure our connection is doomed.

The very nice lady at the counter makes what seem to be Herculean efforts to rebook us. After much typing and phone calling (most of which involves trying to figure out the numbers for other airlines as all the numbers on her list appear to be out of date), she finds us an Air France option. What about our luggage, I ask? She obligingly begins the process to get our checked bags (family travel, ten days…) off the plane.

But Wait! The pilot himself comes out and announces that the radar is repaired. All is well. Except that it isn't. The bad weather has now ripened into ATC delays and we can't go anywhere for an hour. My connection seems utterly doomed.

The flight delay now being ATC rather than mechanical, the status of our flight has changed, and our new tickets — only one or two keypresses away from finality — are no longer possible since Delta won't rebook us on a different carrier for delays which are not their fault.

Gloom. Doom. But Wait! After only a few minutes, the weather report has shifted again, and it's ok to board for immediate departure. If we leave fast enough, we might — might — just make it. We board. Delta does a much better job than American of enforcing boarding order on Miami crowds, who are generally among the most unruly in the world, and boarding proceeds fairly well. Cabin crew explain that local mechanics were able to fix the old part, and all is well.

Except that once we are all in the plane, there's a new problem. There's a man wandering around in the aisles holding a boarding pass, but he doesn't seem to have a seat. In due course we hear that what happened is that a family booked two kids in one seat, but that they're too old to share; a “non-revenue” passenger is thus booted off the plane (a mother with a tiny baby, and then her husband), and the family in question re-seated. We're now too late barring some sort of air-speed miracle.

And off we go to Atlanta. Did I say “to” Atlanta? Maybe “towards” Atlanta would be better. About 20 minutes into the flight, the Captain comes on the PA and says, in best Chuck Yeager right-stuff voice, that the radar has failed again, and we're going to divert to Tampa. No, wait, he's on the PA again a minute later, the company says we're going back to Miami, because it is fractionally closer.

So we're back in Miami. Cabin crew tell us that anyone who wishes to leave the plane here may do so, but if we leave we may not be allowed back on. The captain explains that the offending part is easy to replace, it's just like a circuit board – you snap it in, test it, and then he's fully confident in flying the plane. One Swedish couple leaves, saying they don't trust the plane any more. There's a trickle of departures. One person returns with coffee from Starbucks, and now we all want off. Cabin crew relent — we can get off, but the plane is going to Atlanta eventually, so we should take our stuff if we do in case we aren't there when its ready.

We get off — our connection is history, and I'd like to know our options. And after all, it's clearly mechanical now. Back in line, and in time we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I'm given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she's the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there's no Andrea. She's going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don't need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don't have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

I begin to lumber off at speed back towards BA (the flight is leaving soon). “SIR! SIR!” the last man shouts, chasing me down the concourse. “Wait! I need my copy!” It seems one of the four copies is his. Unfortunately, he has no idea which one of the four is his, and decides after much scrutiny that he wants the original. I'm suspicious. What if BA want that one? Why doesn't he take the last one, the accounting copy? But no, he insists, and I haven't the heart to grab it from his hands. “Just come back if they want this one he says.” Right – the plane will be long gone by that point.

Lumber, lumber, wheeze.

It seems BA are happy with the three copies. It's late by now and the queue at security is mercifully light. We make the plane. We make the connection in London.

Of course, the luggage doesn't make it.

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