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The more time you allow to get through airport security, the less time it takes.
Having returned from an enjoyable Vegas vacation, I am happy to announce that Northwest Airlines sucks a lot. Was my flight cancelled or not? Read on and maybe you'll figure it out ...

I couldn't remember my flight numbers coming back from Vegas, so I called the airline Saturday evening to find them out, as well as the exact times. I went through a voice activated system that asked me when I was leaving and where from, and it named a flight, but I wasn't convinced it was the right one, so I dialed 0 to get an operator. I wish I had never pushed that button.

The operator looked up my reservation and gave me the information - flight 774 from Las Vegas to Minneapolis, departing at 1:10 AM. Then she hit me with the hammer blow: "Sir, that flight has been cancelled." I was irritated, of course, but I figured there was nothing she could do, and she was very accommodating about getting us on another flight at 9:25. So after I got off the phone, I broke the bad news to Jim, Kristy and Emily. Luckily, we had one of our rooms reserved for that night anyway, so we went down to the casino to make the most of another night in Vegas.

At about 11:30 I got an automated call from Orbitz telling me that my original flight, 774, had had ... a gate change.

At this point I tried to get on the phone with Northwest to figure out what was going on. By that time there was no way we could have made the 1:10 flight, but the recorded message I had received made me doubt whether we really did have a reservation on the 9:25 AM flight. Imagine my surprise when, instead of an operator, I got a recorded message saying, "due to extremely heavy call volume, we are unable to assist you at this time." The system then hung up on me. After I called back several times with the same result, we gave up and went to bed.

The next morning I called the airline again and finally got to speak to a real person, who told me that the 1:10 flight had departed on time. Then she said, "Wait, I'm showing that it was on an 8-hour delay." Then she said it seemed to have been cancelled. Finally, she told me, "As to where that plane is right now, I have no clue." In the meantime, though, she confirmed that we did indeed have seats on the 9:25 flight.

When we got to the airport I got what I think is the real story from the ticket guy. He told me that flight 774 was scheduled to continue to Madison after landing in Minneapolis, and that part of the flight had been cancelled - not the part that was supposed to take me and my friends from Vegas to Minneapolis.

Thanks to one misinformed Northwest employee, and probably a really badly designed interface to their computer system, we arrived back in Detroit at 7:40 PM - ten hours later than we were supposed to.

(Emily then had to visit her brother in the hospital, which is another story, and then we had to get back to Cincinnati, which we didn't achieve until 1 AM this morning.)

Incidentally, while I was waiting in line at the airport to talk to a Northwest information desk person, I overheard some people behind me mentioning that they had been in the terminal for almost 24 hours, and still didn't know when they were going to be leaving. A Northwest employee who had the power to help these people, or at least give them some answers, was nowhere to be found.

I'd like to emphasize that all the Northwest employees I spoke to were very pleasant and helpful; however, they were all grossly underinformed. Northwest seems to have left them hanging with inadequate information. What a bunch of dicks.

 
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