I’m not a great fan of poor service. I have to deal with an awful lot of it and it never gets any easier.
Airlines are very prone to bad service. You can imagine how it happens : when something goes wrong, hundreds of unhappy passengers descend on the three unprepared and unwitting employees managing the front desk while the executives that set the business up to fail watch from a safe distance, secure in the knowledge that this will not cost them very much because the three customer service representatives are not empowered to provide the customers with any service.
Delta is the kind of airline where this will occasionally happen. And it happened to me.
Knowing it’s Delta and their check-in tends to take 45 minutes per passenger, I arrived two-and-a-half hours early for my Boston -> New York flight. I then checked in with the automated machines, and was directed to a queue to check in my bag. It was at this point that I noticed that the bag check queue was several times as long as the queue for manual check-in. I tried to change lanes, but was informed that since I had already checked in, I had to stay in this queue. I thought self-service check-in was supposed to make things efficient, but not in Delta-land.
The plane had that run-down, barely-managed-to-clean-it-in-time look and smell that you so often get on internal US flights. We took off on time and landed 40 minutes early. How did this happen? Delta know they’re very often late, and since leaving on time is so complicated, they just add an hour to their flight schedule so they can claim they arrived on time.
We landed, and then spent 90 minutes waiting for our gate to be free so that we could get off the damn plane. We landed 40 minutes early, and left the plane 50 minutes late. Passengers were on the verge of knocking the pilot’s door down and throttling him, partly due to the frustration of missing connecting flights when you’re already on the ground, and partly due to the complete lack of information we were getting. Delta treats its customers like mushrooms : Keep them in the dark and feed them on shit.
Finally off the plane and really really grumpy, I made my way to the baggage claim, where bags began coming out… but not mine. So I go to the lost luggage counter and give them my ticket, and ask where my bag is… and they tell me it’s still in Boston.
How is this possible? I ask. I checked in 2 hours before take-off.
They took it off the plane because the plane was overloaded, they reply.
There’s so much wrong with that statement I don’t know where to start. No doubt they were carrying freight and they if the freight doesn’t get to where its going, they don’t get paid, whereas throwing all my belongings out doesn’t cost them a dime since the chances I was a previously satisfied customer is verging on nil. It is Delta after all.
They promise to delvier the bag to my address sometime the following day, and offer me a courtesy kit (toothpaste, toothbrush, underwear, that sort of thing) before realising they’ve run out and sending me away with nothing.
The bag arrived the following day, and had a little tag attached to it that read, “Perfect Delivery”. I shit you not. Delta doesn’t have much in the way of intelligence at the top of the company, the name inspires thoughts of the dumbest third of a second-rate sorority, but they still seem to have a sense of irony.
