invisible

Reposting this from SQ's forum:
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I just spent 1 hour and 20 min on a phone. I wanted to alter my award SQ booking to convert it to Star alliance award by adding two legs on TK.

First, the phone rep (which I think was sitting somewhere in a village next to Bangalore) on request that I want to add flight from Turkey to Georgia told me that I can't add to the existing reservation flight to US. I had to give him lesson on political geography.

But fun did not ended up here, it just started. When he did pricing it came 45000 miles on flight from SIN to IST and 31500 on IST to TBS. When I told him that I needed star alliance award which according to the chart is 100K round trip miles in C, he told me - there is no such thing. I requested to talk to his supervisor. I was put on hold for 20 min and after that told that supervisor is too busy to talk to me.

At this moment I decided to continue because already spent 50 min on all. I had to explain to him where to find award chart on SQ's website. Got put on hold again, and after another 10 min was told that system does not allow pricing and put on hold for another 15 min.

After 1h and 20 min on call I was told that there are no flights available while all legs are visible on UA's and NH's reservation system. I that moment I simply hang up.

Now I have to call again and if I am not lucky, repeat the whole ordeal.

Please tell me that I am not alone.
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But after this experience, want to ask the audience - what was your worst ever phone call or face-2-face experience with airline/hotel representative or travel agent?

Please give examples when you requested something (service/product/etc) you know was correct and accurate and you got boatload of c$ap in return? Let's leave free upgrade cases outside, because I'm sure this will because #1 crying point....

Thanks.

pinniped

I once had an SFO-MCI flight cancel on United. Agent tried to rebook me on SFO-IAH and asked "is that close enough? Those two airports are next to each other, right?" Yes, they are...if you have a small enough map I suppose.

He was surprised when I informed him that the two cities are roughly as far apart as Mumbai and Delhi. If you had a ticket to one, would you accept a reroute to the other? Can't exactly just grab an Uber home...

After some gentle prodding, he rerouted me through Denver. But it took longer than it should have.

FirstInFlight

I've had some bad calls and I've had some awful calls... but this week the USPS lost a package. We have a tracking number - but they don't know what happened after it cleared customs. They scanned it into their custody and then...nothing. The time and absurdity of the experience of speaking with the USPS customer service morons make airline and hotel incompetence seem mine league.

DavidDTW

UPS isn't any better. I had a HORRIBLE experience with them not too long ago!

CMK10

Last year I had a DL award ticket or RDU-DTW-ORD-ICN on DL/KE metal in Business Class. The night before at 11 PM I got a notification that the ORD-DTW flight was delayed several hours and would cause a misconnect. I researched DL flights and found a RDU-MSP-ORD routing that would work and I called Delta. I got this really awful agent who wouldn't listen and was condescending and rude. She kept insisting, over and over again, that ORD-ICN was sold out. Despite me saying I had a booking on that flight, was checked in, AND HAD A BOARDING PASS I couldn't make her understand. Eventually despite me saying the flights I wanted she offered me another set. Finally she "found" the routing I offered and took the credit for it. The call took nearly an hour.

The kicker was the next day when the load factor in Business on ORD-ICN was at most 33%. Sold out my behind.

CitizenWorld

I was on hold with QF customer support for 40min last year before being connected to an operator. Unacceptable.

VH-RMD

Mine was 70 mins, on an international call.....

Doc Savage

Wasted about 40 minutes arguing with an Iberia rep about the free overnight accommodations they promised in Madrid with overnight layovers. He kept coming up with excuse after excuse and finally resorted to lying about why they couldn't do it.

Great customer service at that airline, simply stellar.

(Laziest bunch of twits I think I've ever seen pretend to work on their planes, too.)

txflyer77

I was trying to make changes to a UA award that included some LH F legs. DEN-YYZ-FRA-TXL/ZRH-FRA-YYZ-DEN.

I wanted to change the DEN-YYZ leg. Called UA and somehow the agent wound up deleting my entire itinerary, couldn't piece it back together and told me there was nothing she could do.

May that agent never fly an on-time flight again.

I called UA back three times playing call center roulette and fortunately found an agent willing to talk to their *A liaison and LH counterparts in order to put everything back together.

jinglish

My story isn't of incompetence but was a bit cringeworthy. A couple years back I was dropping bags and getting passports checked at PDX for a DL flight. I had only recently started traveling a lot, so I was a little concerned by the fact that my and friend's names were truncated on our boarding passes, since I'd heard that the TSA could be sticklers about names on IDs and reservations matching and I didn't realize that that was just the way DL did BPs.

As a software engineer who uses the word "truncate" at work every once in a while, I thought nothing about using it here, but the DL check-in agent said she didn't know what it meant. I explained and she said it wouldn't be a problem... and then she didn't let the vocab issue go. For most of the rest of our ID check and bag drop process, she went on about how she couldn't be expected to know such a fancy word because she went to a small-town high school here in Oregon. My friend and I were a bit uncomfortable as she tried to justify not knowing a word that I absolutely did not care she hadn't heard before.

That was my first face-to-face interaction with a DL employee. Not the best first impression. But I guess I'm pretty lucky that after two 50k+-mile years that's the worst airline customer service situation I can complain about.

mmff

Did they manage to get your itinerary back?

Duke787

Vueling flight got canceled a couple weeks back due to weather. Called in and they told me they couldn't issue the refund (we took alternate transport) because they couldn't see what happened with the flight yet in their system.

Asked for a supervisor and they told me the supervisor wouldn't talk to me because they wouldn't say anything different.

Eventually threatened a CC chargeback and miraculously the system allowed them to process the refund instantly.

kb9522

USPS is the worst. To this day they still can't explain to me why the product is called "Priority 2-Day" if it takes three days to deliver.

txflyer77

Mostly. Took several hours but they managed to piece it back together.

jimmielin

A few weeks ago I was on a CA-operated, CA-marketed (Air China) flight as part of a multi-city itinerary on another *A airline's stock.

I needed to check-in for the flight online and get a boarding pass in order to get Macau's travel agency to issue tickets to the HKG Sky Pier. I called CA's customer service line and they said that there was nothing they could do, they don't understand what PNR is (Mainland Chinese airlines do not use PNRs I believe.) and as soon as they heard ticket wasn't CA's 999- stock, they said "No we cannot check in or select seats we don't know about tickets unless they are 999 tickets".

HUACA did not work, switching languages did not work either.

In the end had to call the TA which pulled some strings to check me in (who knows how!), but it broke the rest of the itinerary and I've been unable to check-in online for any of the remaining legs on SA, LH, etc... (I could on the outbound segments.) :/