Yeah, the some old queen of a flight attendant will straighten her ass out, as the joke goes…
It’s not at all uncommon that airlines codeshare. When I’ve come across it, it’s always been shown upfront (e.g USAirways flight xxx operated by United). I didn’t realize it the first time it happened to me, so I ended up waiting in the wrong check-in line. Guess I should have paid more attention.
I actually don’t mind the Philly airport, especially what it’s like now compared to a few years ago. What exactly do digital clocks have to do with waiting on the runway? Do digital clocks somehow alter the reality of weather and traffic?
They always do, in my experience, though it’s easy to miss. They also have those handy displays all over the airport showing gate changes.
How would the crew on your arriving flight know that? Do you think they keep track of the status of all outbound flights? Again, check the handy monitors as soon as you land for updates – I do that even when they announce gates.
That is annoying. There should be someone around to answer questions.
Other people have responding as to how stupid this is. I’ll just agree with them.
I think dealing with lost luggage is much more important than a transportation voucher.
What exactly is an airline employee supposed to do about ground transportation – get their car and drive you personally?
Dealing with delays can be quite annoying, but it’s not like the airline benefits from this. It costs them a lot money to deal with delays. I think if you check the terms closely, they did hold up their end of the contract.
This is real good advice.
I do a lot of traveling, and have experienced everything you’ve complained about - though rarely all on the same trip. What gotpasswords said is the best way to approach traveling by air. If you have the right mindset, you just resign yourself to potential delays and hassles. The right mindset keeps my blood pressure within safe limits.
I listen to cockpit communications when I can, and the flight crew isn’t always as good as they could be when communicating to the passengers, but they do try keep turbulence to an absolute minimum.
There are dipshits in every service industry - encountering a dipshit or two when also having delays and flight problems is even harder to put up with.
I just try and remember how very complicated it is to move that many people from here to there, and how many little things have to go exactly right to give you a problem-free trip.
NinjaChick, are you flying out of Albuquerque, or are you paying extra to fly out of Santa Fe? Quite frankly, I’d fly Southwest into Philly from Albuquerque. I had to go through Philly for the first time a couple weeks ago on US Air, and let me tell you, I was not impressed. Not with the Philly airport and definitely not with US Air. To top it off, this flight made me break several of my cardinal rules about air travel, including:
- Always book your own travel
- Never travel in groups
- Never sit on the ground for more than 90 minutes
- Never fly legacy airlines (though I make an exception for American)
- Never fly into an airport requiring a puddle-jumper
Keep repeating to youself that it is much better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here. This applies to both weather issues, and mechanical problems.
I pit you in return on behalf of all the business travellers who fly round trip at least once a week becuase we had lots of disruptions and delays caused by the extra traffic of students on spring break and bb fans going to March Madness. My flight from Houston was delayed so instead of getting to bed before 11:00 PM last night I didn’t get to my hotel until 3:00 this morning. Shit happens but it wasn’t worth starting a thread over.
It’s funny, though, how some airlines seem far more plagued with delays than others. In years of flying, I have never taken a Delta flight that took off within two hours of the scheduled departure time. The other airlines I deal with are almost never two hours late, but Delta is never that early. What’s their excuse?
It’s not like it’s China Air or Air Cubana or something thats going to fall out of the sky. And chances are you were warned at some point (usually with “operated by XXX” in tiny print somewhere.) Would you really have paid for a more expensive ticket/less convient ticket that was all on Northwest? I know very few people that would. Staring at Delta’s color scheme for a few hours isn’t going to kill you.
This is something it took me a while to learn, but it’s worth learning.
Airports are not full of shiny cogs working in a well choreographed mechanical ballet. It’s not like there is a central plan of exactly what is going to happen that day. They are full of planes going in and coming out, and nobody- not the airport planner, not air traffic control, not your airline and not your pilot- ever knows exactly what is going where at any given time. They just hear what planes need to land and try to find room for them while hopefully not delaying the people trying to take off and finding gates for everyone.
Ground controller are working in a stressful, dangerous (most aircraft accidents happen while taxiing) job where a snowstorm in Tokyo can throw off everything for days. Honestly, getting your plane out on time is at the bottom of your list. Right up there at the top is keeping your taxiing airplane from being plowed in to by some guy trying to land. Do you want them to change their priorities?
Well, now you’ve learned something for next time. Because airlines do not own or run airports (they merely rent the space) they can’t always have perfect control over what happens where. Luckly they have a real-time update system on those neat little moniters. Always check them, and you’ll always be right.
Oh poor baby, for a moment you thought you were going to have to delay dinner by two hours. Thank god that didn’t happen!
Your pilot and flight attendents are busy doing the important task of getting your plane off the runway and to a gate safely. This is actually the most accident-prone phase of flight. They really don’t have time to listen to the ground crew babble about the ins and outs of every other flight leaving from that airport and convey this to the passengers. They are busy keeping the plane moving and everyone in it alive. Once again, there are moniters near every gate that will give you up-to-date information. It is your responsibility to check them.
Do you really expect every Northwest/Delta empoyee in the airport to know the details of flights they arn’t involved in? They should have had someone to meet you at the gates, but you can’t really blame random gate staff for not being able to answer questions that are probably just now being worked out between the mechanics and flight crew. Very few people need to know the reason for delays (late is late, isn’t it?) and that kind of information probably rarely even reaches the gates.
This is where you go too far. Do you think the pilots take glee in scaring the passengers? Do you think they seek out turbulence for fun? Their number one priority is your safetly. Their life depends on it. They do the things they do for a reason.
So wait, you expect everyone with lost luggage to wait- possibly missing their transportation and other flights (some airlines don’t transfer luggage)- so that you can get to your cab a bit quicker? If your luggage was lost, would you gladly step aside so that some lady needing a cab could do her thing? Would you feel the same way if you needed to get that luggage on a flight somewhere, and a few extra minutes would mean leaving your luggage in the Albaquerque airport forever?
Oh come the fuck on. Your old enough to fly, your old enough to hail a fucking cab. Nobody is going to hop out of the shadows of the airport and rape you. What do you want? Some big strong man to protect you? Someone to make you hot cocoa and secret you in a well-guarded ladies’ waiting room and make sure you never come in contact with the gasp dark?
It’s the fucking airport! The place is crawling with cameras and police! You’d be hard pressed to find a safer place.
Grow up, woman! You give us all a bad name by making it seem like we are so totally helpless that we can’t even handle a simple trip by ourselves. This is exactly why people claim that women arn’t suited for some jobs- they hear whiny people like you freaked out of their mind because they have to do something on their own for once. Every time you use your “weakness” as a woman to get your way or add to your whine, you hurt every single one of us that wants to be afforded the same oppertunities our male friends have.
Right now their are women in Iraq, getting shot at. There are women business people travelling all over the world without thinking twice about waiting for a cab. There are nuns and missionaries travelling alone to the most blighted parts of the world- sometimes at night. You need to get over your precious self and realize that you don’t need to be sheltered and protected all the damn time. You really can hail a cab- even at night- and it’s really perfectly fine. You don’t need special protection because you are a lady. You don’t need to be coddled and sequestered. You are strong and capable. Act like it.
And don’t use your gender as an excuse, for fuck’s sake. Your hurting all of us.
The airline industry can get you anywhere in the world in less than thirty hours. Airports coordinate thousands of aircrafts in the air at any given time, and somehow get nearly every single one safely at the right place. Meanwhile they are handling millions of pieces of luggage, serving thousands of drinks and pretzels, and deal with people of every nation on the Earth. They maintain thousands of airplanes- each of which must be in perfect condition at all times- and have some of the most highly trained professionals around.
They made a machine that makes people fly! You can get across the nation in six hours! It’s fucking amazing! Every flight is a marvel of engineering and coordination. It’s not a perfect system, but the mere fact it exists is a miracle.
And all you can see- out of this increadable complex system representing the pinnacle of the human imagination and mankind’s dream of flight- is that you were two hours late to your dorm room. Maybe you’d consider trying a stagecoach next time?
Not to mention I’m sure they’d gladly accept a 2 hour delay if it meant they were winging it home after Spring Break.
Sorry, no sympathies here, either.
Most of your troubles could have been avoided by reading. Reading your itinerary would have told you that you were on a flight operated by Delta. Reading the monitors would have told you that not only had your flight been delayed, but the departing gate had changed. They probably did announce it, but it is easy to miss in the general din in airports.
You final complaint reminds me of the woman in front of my wife and me in the Sydney airport on Sept 14, 2001. She yelled at the Qantas ticket agent for ten minutes because she couldn’t fly back to LA to day like her ticket said, and what was Qantas going to do about that? After she left, my wife rolled her eyes to the ticket agent, and asked (politely) what the latest news was. After hearing that US airspace was still closed, she asked if he could recommend an inexpensive nearby hotel. The agent gave us vouchers for a cheap hotel nearby, and then told us where we could rent a cell phone so Qantas could phone us when we could fly home. The moral is that these people have shitty jobs where people yell at them about things that are beyond their control. If you treat them nicely, they’ll bend over backwards for you. Unless you’re in St. Louis, then you’re screwed.
Oh, so true…my fiance lives there, and he’s not once been on time flying out of there to Boston. The first time I flew back from there, I was stuck in the plane on the runway for an hour, and it was literally about 90 degrees on the plane - no A/C. It cooled off once we were in the air, but that hour was not pleasant.
My wife used to travel to Peoria weekly, which meant either American through Chicago or TWA through St. Louis. No matter how nice and polite she was to the gate agents in St. Louis, they were still rude, inconsiderate, and unhelpful to her. Unlike Peoria where they all knew her by name.
I don’t understand this. Why is lost luggage a priority over a transportation voucher? They seem to be equally important. If I’m next in the customer service line with a transportaion voucher problem, I couldn’t give a fuck about the person behind me with a lost bag. Wait your turn, bub.
I have to agree about the Philly airport. For those of you mentioning the monitors - in Philly they lie. I spent the weekend before Easter in Philly, flew in, flew out. On the leg in the plane landed and taxied and we are told we can use cell phones all in the matter of minutes, no hanging out on the runway or anything. I call the friend who is picking me up and he asks me where I have been.
The monitors, and the employess of the airline, were insisting that we had been on the ground nearly an hour when we had just landed.
On the leg out my flight was delayed by over five hours and moved gates. When I finally boarded the sole monitor that was actually on, serving six gates, was declaring that my flight had left on time from its original gate. Again, there was no announcement, I don’t know who figured out we were moving gates, but I followed someone I had overheard talking about the gate change. Not an airline employee in sight. I had a big book, so I just stayed calm, but I was not impressed. So “Read the monitors” is not a solution - they are not infailable real time data sources.
Especially if you’re referring to O’Hare.
Other airlines do in fact have attendants announce gates for connecting flights during the final portion of the flight. I have never heard the pilot or a member of the flight crew making such an announcement during descent or taxiing, so I am skeptical of your claim that lives would be endangered by supplying this information.
It’s a matter of customer service. Some airlines take more trouble with it than others.
It sounds like the Philly airport joins St. Louis as one of the worst.
Lost baggage should be a priority, because the extra time could be the difference between it being put on the next flight and it waiting until tomorrow.
And if the gods are really angry, “waiting until tomorrow” means “getting put on a flight tomorrow, which is delayed, which means the luggage couldn’t be taken through Customs that day, which was the day before Christmas Eve, so it was taken through Customs on Christmas Eve, too late for a Fed Ex delivery, and Northwest apparently has no other procedure for getting the luggage out to its owners, at least not on Christmas Eve when they don’t even answer their own fucking phones, so the owners have to wait until the following Monday to get their luggage, and by the way Merry Christmas!”
Not that I am bitter. 
And for the record, no customer with a transportation voucher was involved. This was apparently all caused by the dear folks at Schipol re-booking us (when we missed our connection) onto a flight that left too soon for their baggage system to handle. If SAS continues to insist they can’t make money on a direct Oslo-New York or Newark flight, can someone please recommend a way to get us to Newark Airport next time, that doesn’t suck? 
Or a few days even - granted, this was about 18 years ago, but on a family trip to Orlando, the suitcase containing both my sister’s and my clothes was lost…for four days. Since the only clothes we had on us were more suitable for New Hampshire winters than Florida winters, my parents had to buy several new outfits for both of us, including shoes. I don’t know how common this is now, but losing luggage can be very costly and a huge hassle, much more than having to wait half an hour to go home. The quicker the airline can figure out where your missing luggage is, the less likely it is that it will be on the next flight to Australia when you’re supposed to be vacationing in Orlando, FL.
Try being stuck on a Northwest flight in seat 62-K for 12+ hours (which I will be subjected to in a few days), then let’s talk… 
Although, I wholeheartedly agree that the Philly airport sucks. I had to go from Terminal A to Terminal F a few weeks ago. The shuttle was inexplicably not running, plus you have to leave the secured area, then go through the TSA security dance to enter Terminal F.