I was flying home after a week spent in Cleveland. To get home I have to make a connection in Cincinnati. I’m at the Cleveland airport with plenty of time to catch my plane. An announcement is made that my flight will be about 20 minutes late. 20 minutes, I think, no big deal. I’ll still have plenty of time to catch my home leg. 20 minutes after our scheduled departure time we board, close up, push back and take off.
We arrive in Cleveland at concourse C and I check the flight departure info. My plane is still on time and I have 20 minutes to make it to the gate on A councourse.
To get to A councourse I have to catch a shuttle bus. I head straight for the bus departure point and stand with 15 or 20 people waiting for the next bus. About 5 minutes later it arrives. We load up and head for A concourse. It takes another 5 minutes to drive accross the active taxiways and unload the bus.
I double time to the gate. The sign board says the the flight departs at 8:10. My watch says 8:00. I rush up to the gate agent and ask if my flight has boarded yet? She says that it has already closed up and that I won’t be able to get on. No amount of pleading will get her to change her mind…rules are rules!
I take a few deep breaths and calm myself down. OK, I ask, when’s the next flight? Not until 10:30 tommorrow morning, she tells me. OH FUCK, I think to myself, but I manage to not say it out loud. She agrees to give me a motel and meal voucher and I start to turn away to head for the motel. I turn back to the agent, because a thought occurred to me, and I asked her if my plane was oversold? Well yes, she admitted, it was.
I WAS BUMPED by default! They knew my connection was late. If they had a seat for me they would have been overhead paging me to the gate. I heard nary a peep from them.
Their management can go to a hell where they will be strapped into too small seats and be served only airline food while small children scream in their ears. All while flying through a perpetual thunder storm.
I don’t understand. If you arrived on time for your 8:10 flight, how can they deny you a seat? Overbooking was not your fault.
Granted, the last time I flew was eight plus years ago, so I may be a bit naive here. But it seems to me if you show up on time for your flight they need to get you the next flight, even if it’s with another airline.
I don’t know – this doesn’t seem like something to get worked up about. Especially since you were given a food and hotel voucher. Besides, getting to the gate 10 minutes prior to departure very well could have left you SOL even without the flight’s being oversold. I’ve noticed recently that a lot of airlines have a policy of closing up 15 minutes before departure; if you’re not at the gate by then, you’re not getting on the plane.
It’s a lot to get worked up about because instead of getting home at 9:30 Friday night I don’t get home until noon Saturday. And I forget to mention, my luggage didn’t get home until Sunday.
Ugh; that sorta thing always sucks. But, this kinda baffles me. Usually, when there is a connecting flight, don’t the flight attendents on flight A make some sort of call ahead to flight B? Since you were also switching terminals, were you switching carriers? Had you mentioned to your flight attendants that you had a connecting flight?
I would make alittle noise to the management, if I were you. You never know - they might give you a voucher or something.
The next morning was the next possible flight I could get. Believe me I checked into alternative airports, but all of the flights to them were full.
Arriving at the gate at 8:00 is hardly “on time”. Things obviously vary between airports, but most places I’ve flown from require you to be at the gate at least 20 minutes before departure, if not 45.
The OP was damn lucky to get a motel voucher.
You have to look at it from the airlines perspective. They basically have to take a whole lot of variables into account when boarding real live passengers on a flight. I will be the first to admit that their information systems aren’t that great for this sort of thing but even if they were, it isn’t always something they can bank on.
You original flight could have arrived into the airport area and then be held up by air traffic control delays or a weather delay. Once it was on the ground, it could have been stopped next to gate area on a gate hold. Once the plane is up to the gate, it takes many minutes to deboard a plane and if connecting passengers are in the back, it may be 10 minutes or more. Once you were in the terminal, they did not know if you are able to run or just hobble along or the condition of the people moving systems that are getting you to the plane.
Meanwhile, they are looking at an empty seat and standby passengers that got bumped from earlier flights breathing down the gate agents neck about getting on that flight. At some point, they just have to make a firm decision and call things the way they stand at that moment.
The airlines work on a huge, extremely expensive to run interdependent network, that means that even one minute delays can echo through the system and add up to cumulative hours or days lost time to those that are sitting there ready to go.
I have been there and it does suck but you have to look at it from a logistics/expense/efficiency/logistics perspective. Holding the plane for you could add up to losses that you can’t even comprehend right now for many people.
If the connecting flight was with the same airline there is no reason why they should not have held the plane for him. I fly frequently and I have sat in a plane for 20 minutes after the scheduled departure time because of a late flight that had some connecting passengers. I have also had to inform the Flight Attendants of a quick changeover and they have had people standing at the terminal to escort me to the next plane to make sure I get in.
It all depends on the company you fly with.
It all depends on the situation you are in. An airline is first and foremost a business and inconviencing one passenger by making them stay in a hotel overnight may be well worth it from a business standpoint even if you lose them as a customer forever.
A hotel and meal voucher may cost $100 or so based on their deals.
A 20 minute delay for an airliner that has 150 passengers and 6 crew represents 3120 minutes lost or over 2 days time total. There is nothing cheap about operating an airline. You have pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, security, ground operations, and flight operations at headquarters on payroll every second that plane is delayed.
That could represent thousands of dollars in losses for one passenger. It may make that passenger switch to another airline but it would be unlikely that the lifetime profits resulting from their business would ever pay for the cost of the delay. Combine that with the fact that they are also inconviencing many other passengers that were on time then it becomes a cost/benefit analysis issue.
The OP arrived well after the final boarding call and the airline probably had other, equally deserving people ready to take the seat.
It does suck but at some point, they have to make the decision to have an on-time flight based on the cost/benefits, give the seat away and seal the door. If there are many passengers that are delayed, they may make another decision using the same rational.
There is simply no better way to do it.
Don’t look at it from the airlines’ perspective; let the airlines do that. Look at it from your persepective, as the consumer. Next time you make travel plans, remember the extra 14 hours the airlines tacked on to your time in transit. You may decide that there are better alternatives.
The problem with that idea is that I have had that same scenario happen to me with most major carriers. It sucks but they all have to do it to survive and make the system function. What would suck worse is be on an airline that holds a plane for someone that is ten minutes late and then just two minutes more for the next ones and there are two more people arriving in five minutes…oops. We are an hour late and just sent shock waves through the whole network because of it and we just incurred $3000 of additional operating expenses that we will have to pass on to our future customers.
In the best interest of everyone, complicated logistical networks have to mainly take overall efficiency into account and just decide when the door is going to be closed bar nothing.
Buses and trains are the exact same way. Why do you expect differently from the airlines? Other methods can cripple the system.
Bullshit.
If you read the OP, you’d see that the only reason he was late for his second flight was because the first leg of his flight was late.
Assuming the OP was flying with the same airline for both legs, the airline presumably wouldn’t have booked him on that itinerary if they didn’t think it was a feasible connection. Therefore, if he’s late for the second leg, it’s the airline’s fault.
A motel voucher was the least they could do.
ivylass:
Most airlines nowdays overbook pretty much all their flights. The conditions on your ticket usually state that if you’re not ready to board on time your seat can be given to another person.
When they oversell, and it looks like they’re going to have to bump people off the flight, they usually make an announcement offering a free flight to anyone who is prepared to be bumped to a later flight. There are usually plenty of takers for this offer.
But you’re still looking at it from the airlines’ point of view. As a consumer, all you have to do is patronize the organization that meets your needs. It’s also nice if you let an organization that doesn’t know what they’re doing wrong. Nice, but optional. The consumer’s job is to reward the companies that meet his needs. A train, or even a bus, could likely have gotten him home quicker and cheaper. He might have been able to drive. I don’t know. What I do know is that companies never provide better service than their customers demand.
It’s my impression that while yes, an airline can hold a flight to allow connecting passengers on a late-arriving flight to make the flight, especially if it’s the last fight of the day, it’s also heavily dependent on the number of passengers involved. If it’s one or two people? Chances are extremely slim that will happen. If it’s a group of 20 or 30, it may be worth it strictly from a financial perspective to hold the flight.
Ultimately, the airlines are a business and, as such, care more for their bottom line than about angry feelings engendered in a few passengers. I don’t like it, but it does help reduce my blood pressure to accept it.
Myself, I avoid connections under 90 min. if I can at all, unless it’s same-airline and I know the terminal layout. I’ll even pay more money to avoid it.
I’ve usually been told I need to be at the gate at least 30 minutes before departure, but obviously whoever sold the OP the ticket did so without a moment’s thought of that.
To the OP: If you had to take a bus from one concourse to the other, doesn’t that mean you had to go outdoors, and hence through a security checkpoint at the second concourse? Wouldn’t that have blown such a tight connection out of the water?
One of the things I like about WestJet in Canada is that they will not oversell, and it is something that they promote. If they sell you a ticket, you’ve got a seat. Though in many ways WestJet was patterned after Southwest, this is one area of divergence, and one I’m glad for. I’ve seen *Airline * on A & E and it seems that it is SOP for Southwest to oversell from explanations given to frustrated (non)-passengers. Apparently you are anything but early at the gate at your own peril on Southwest.
Not necessarily.
You can catch shuttle buses between concourses at O’Hare without needing to re-renter through security. Same with the big shuttle thingies at Dulles.
In each cases, you are always in a secure area, so there’s no need to re-enter.
I typically make a connection in Cincinnati from Concourse C (which makes me think that the airline was Delta, as they’re the ones who operate most of Concourse C). Everything’s internal - I’ve never had to go through another security checkpoint to change terminals. You leave one concourse before leaving security, and the bus takes you to the other terminal after the security checkpoint.
Every time I fly through Cincinnati, regardless of whether or not the itinerary says I can make it, I typically allow at least an hour to an hour and a half between flights - mainly because my flight out of Akron is usually late. I think I’ve had an on-time flight maybe twice in the 12-15 times I’ve flown out of there? Plus, the distance between concourses is absolutely insane.
But that’s with a lot of trial and error - if you’re letting a travel agent book you or booking online, and they give you the itinerary as a viable option, one would assume that you’ll have no problem making that connection, right? So I’d say the airline would be at fault for knowingly allowing a difficult connection.