I have a lifetime gold card on American Airlines. They re not perfect, but they have never canceled

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 one way car rentals europe 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, one way car rentals europe brought them back.
Eventually one way car rentals europe 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, one way car rentals europe and this fellow one way car rentals europe was definitely concentrating. For some reason, one way car rentals europe 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?
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 one way car rentals europe 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. one way car rentals europe There was another one way car rentals europe long round of holding during which she told me to just wait. We were told that the flight one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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. one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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, one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe of tickets in the morning one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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. one way car rentals europe We make it. But there s no Andrea. one way car rentals europe 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, one way car rentals europe 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 one way car rentals europe 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.
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.
Don t heap praise on American one way car rentals europe just yet. I was AAdvantage Gold/Platinum for ten years. When I went to Brazil for my wedding, I flew JFK to Miami; Miami to Caracas: Caracas to Miami; Miami to São Paulo; São Paulo to Belo Horizonte. It took me 48 hours.
US Airways has done similar crap to me, including rebooking me without telling me on a flight home from Anchorage that had *5* flight segments, the last 3 of which were for the day before the flight left Anchorage . It took an hour on the phone with customer service to get it down to 4 segments, all in sequential order (!!), but then equipment problems on segment 2 led to a cascade of events requiring that every time I deplaned from a segment I had to dash to customer service to fix the problems created by the previous customer service rep. US Airway sent me a voucher for $300 by way of compensation (this had been on a business class ticket, and they had flown me steerage almost all the way home). Bwah.
I know that this is probably not a good time to mention this but I personally like Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand to the UK. Prices tend to be reasonably good, fleet is typically newer and better configured from a passenger s point of view, the food is much better, you can use air miles from US flag carriers to buy tickets. Also, I have found both of these airlines to be more receptive to my needs and (within obvious limits) their employees seem much more will to exert themselves to make my journey easier and more pleasant. In short, they don't suffer from the many deficiencies of US flagged airlines.
It is a mark of a fragile system that failures cascade. And the air travel system is nothing if not fragile. It isn t (just) that they all suck. It s that the system pushes them to suck. Delta perhaps more than the others because it s under more financial pre