Developments on my recent round trip with you from White Plains -> Detroit -> Des Moines lead me to believe that you, as an air carrier, have your collective noggin jammed firmly up your collective cornhole.
Not only have you built yourselves an entire concourse with no restrooms at DTW (unless you just haven’t finished building it yet), but you seemed to think it well within normal procedure to cancel the second leg of my return flight less than one hour before I arrived at DSM to board the first leg.
Adding insult to injury, you then automagically rescheduled me onto a flight that had ALREADY TAKEN THE FUCK OFF, apparently in order that some parallel-world self of mine might make the only remaining connection to HPN that day (leaving DTW at about the same time I was to leave DSM). If Northwest is offering Fourth Dimension service, great, but I’d at least expect a little publicity about same.
All right, you did book me into LaGuardia, and on a roomy A320 to boot. That was decent of you. But it would have been nice not have to walk six miles down the concourse, and take the neat-o tunnel of light and music whose walkways move at the speed of a reservations clerk on Xanax, AND walk six miles down the NEXT concourse, all in the course of making a 35-minute connection to my LGA flight.
Luckily, I can take my frequent flyer miles from this trip and kick them so far up your nose that—er, apply them toward my Continental OnePass account. So all is not lost.
But this will be the last business Northwest gets from me in a long, a very long, O! a very very long time.
I don’t think any of the other airlines are any better. (Maybe Southwest, but they don’t fly into Memphis, so I never get to use them.) My last trip was via Continental, and that just sucked from start to long past what should’ve been the finish.
? There are a lot of bathrooms in the Northwest Terminal. Perhaps you were not “seeing” them because they don’t have doors, just curved entry hallways? There is a bathroom at every little food/shop cluster, near the water fountains.
To be perfectly accurate, the A concourse is divided into 10 “core units” housing services, shops and food. Each core unit has men’s, women’s and family bathrooms, for a total of 30 bathrooms on the concourse.
Check out the C concourse (where the Airlinks gate). It’s a loooong hallway and there were no johns except downstairs from the front end of said hallway. As I said, maybe they’re putting them in, but I didn’t notice any places to put them.
Yep. Formerly White Plains Army Airfield, scheduled passenger flights began in 1947. Thanks to opposition from rich property owners in the area, it was 48 years before the county could build a terminal. Before that, you basically had a Departures Shack and an Arrivals Shack.
BTW, I filled out a complaint form on their website about my experience, and they gave me a voucher for 150 bucks of my next ticket with them. The down side, of course, is that I’d have to fly with them again to use it. Unlikely to happen.
Northwest Airlines seems to be the only one affordable to fly out of Des Moines. They suck. On a recent trip, they lost my luggage both ways, then when I whined, explained to me how it wasn’t their fault because I travelled through their busy hub; when I pointed out that this was ridiculous, they gave me a waiver for $25 off a $200+ flight (usable within 3 months). I threw it away. They never actually apologized, which is what I wanted.
Lest you think the baggage was just me, oh no – the two people I travelled with lost their bags on the way there, and they weren’t recovered for three days; another person with our company who traveled the week before with Northwest lost all of hers both ways, too.
Before that, I travelled to DFW; they routed me through Atlanta (DSM to Atlanta to DFW, huh?) and I was delayed both times leaving Atlanta for several hours for no apparent reason.
Before THAT, my return flight was delayed by 30 hours due to two different planes having two different mechanical problems. Actually, we didn’t know it was going to be 30 hours; they kept just delaying a little bit, and a little more, and more, then overnight, then half-hour and hour delays all day long until they finally levelled with us that the problem was requiring a new plane and the crew wouldn’t be awake for 4 hours. Thanks guys. Fortunately, during this mess, they did put us up for the night, but only after I said, “So, where are you putting us up?” after they tried to shoo us from the counter with our tickets for the next day. No meal tickets, no reimbursement for the rental car to the hotel which was a 45 minute drive away.
I hate Northwest. I wish I didn’t have to fly them, but I don’t get to make the reservations.
Yeah, they are. Northwest is a nasty, hostile, incompetently run company that stays in business solely because the rest of the industry was so busy drooling over the southern routes that they forgot to put any competition up in the northern half of the country. North Central Airlines would probably be be giving Southwest good competition, today, except that they made the mistake of being a publicly traded corporation at a time when NorthWest had an excess of cash so that NW swallowed and destroyed them.
I would generally rather travel Greyhound than NorthWest.
We were bumped onto Northwest against our will when we travelled over Christmas. What should have happened was, we should have taken a KLM flight (although our tickets said Continental for the whole route) from Oslo to Amsterdam, and then a Continental flight from Amsterdam to Newark. What really happened was that the flight to Amsterdam was delayed and we didn’t make our connection, so we were re-booked before we even landed onto a flight to Detroit which we could only make if we ran across the terminal. I barely had time to yell the new flight information through a payphone to my parents before we were hussled on board. We arrived in Detroit to find that our luggage had not followed us and our onward flight to Newark had been cancelled, and we were again re-booked onto another flight, two hours later.
We finally arrived in Newark after over twenty-four hours on the road to find a huge line at the lost luggage counter. I’d taken care of registering the lost luggage in Detroit but they told me I had to give the people at Newark my address. And the Newark clerks didn’t want to hear this and just take my papers so we could head on to Pennsylvania, oh no. I had to stand in line. I had a serious fit and they took the damn paper just to get me out of there. Grrr.
Our luggage took five days to get to our destination, and their lost luggage number operates on banker’s hours… so on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day following which happened to be a Sunday, we had no clue where our luggage was.
Oh. My. God… I remember that old airport.
I couldn’t believe that one of the wealthiest counties on the face of the planet had an airport that was, in reality, one big shack and one big quonset hut.
And without air conditioning, no less!