Preparing to leave on a flight from Burlington, VT to Columbus, OH to see my wife I get online and find out my flight is delayed. So I show up at the airport an hour before my flight (a small airport and I have no bags to check, so this should be enough). I find that I can’t check in using the self-serve kiosk because it’s within 30 minutes of the scheduled departure time. The departure board, the automated phone system and website all know that the flight is still at least an hour a away, but the kiosk won’t take me because it’s within 30 minutes. Great. Why isn’t this database connected to all the other databases so that I can check in 30 minutes from the currently announced time of departure, rather than some schedule that slipped days ago?

So I go stand in line and about 40 minutes after my arrival at the airport, I get a ticket agent who says she won’t check me in because they can’t check anyone in within 20 minutes of departure. It is exactly 20 minutes from the announced departure time which, by the way, was moved up by 10 minutes since I checked the website 45 minutes earlier. Finally, after getting a bit hot, she called to “reopen” the gate and get me on the flight. As I gather my things, she yells “Run sir!” I am still gathering some stuff (this is a total of about 26 seconds by the way) and she yells “Sir! You have to run now!” So I run. I offend a woman by cutting in line a bit during the security check. I get there and the gate is closed. Why? Because the aircraft is not even in the airport yet!

We finally load and the gate closes at 5:55. It was 5:00 when she told me she would not allow me on the plane because it was within twenty minutes of departure. As it turns out, the flight wouldn’t even land at the airport until 5:30. Why isn’t the customer service terminal connected to a database that updates in real time or near real time? In an era when Wal-Mart can forecast, not just record, how much it will sell of any given item hour-by-hour through any given day, how can US Airways tell a customer that he doesn’t have time to get to the gate when the plane is still thirty minutes from landing (and again, this is a small airport and you can get to any gate in five minutes).

Then when I get there, I find that the 4:55 flight to La Guardia is now scheduled for 5:20. Of course it is 5:20 and the plane is nowhere to be seen. Whatever. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is that the 12:24 flight to La Guardia is scheduled to leave at 5:49 (I think they may also need a lesson in significant digits). I can’t describe how mad I would be to see the 4:55 flight leave before me if I were on the 12:24. But it gets better. When I get on the plane, approximately 1/3 of the seats are empty. Why didn’t they just fill it with people from the 12:24? I can only guess that it’s because once again their database is not up to the task and they didn’t have a count of seats available.

So then I get to La Guardia and things go reasonably smoothly to get on my next plane, despite delays. My boarding pass says that I’m in row 9D. The guy in front of me is in 5F. The only thing is, the plane only has three rows, labelled A, B and C. After everyone decides that the obvious solution is to take any seat, since this is obviously completely messed up, the flight attendant gets on the intercom to explain the seating situation. Row A is A, Row D is Row B and Row F is Row C. Makes perfect sense. Somewhere there was a software problem. Since that rule meant that everything mapped perfectly and there was no conflict between someone assigned to seat 9F and someone assigned to seat 9C, presumably the computer knew all along that there were only three rows, A, D and F of course.

Of course, all that data exists. It’s all available in some systems, but not in others. As a result, customers are mad and confused. Customer service reps are harried and yelled at. But that’s okay, because the airlines have so many customers and are making so much money, they can afford to piss off customers. Or maybe not.

Filed under: Consumer Chronicles

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