Below is an account of a recent trip (June) my sister and I took to Brazil. It's long, because many things happened on both the way down and back again.
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My sister and I flew coach class from Portland, OR, via Atlanta, to Sao Paulo in June. From there, we planned to fly TAM Airlines to Iguazu Falls, spend 2 days, then use TAM to fly to Curitiba, Brazil, our final destination. On the return trip we flew TAM to Sao Paulo, then Delta the rest of the way home , in business class, which was the highest class the airline offered on that route.

Way down:

1. Our plane left Portland on time, and we thought we were set. However, about 45 minutes out from Atlanta, the pilot announced that we were being diverted to Chatanooga because there had been a storm in Atlanta, the air traffic there was backed up, and the air control tower was asking us to circle for an hour. This is standard operating procedure for Atlanta airport, which is one of the most crowded in the USA. However, we didn’t have enough fuel to circle for an hour, so we had to land in Chatanooga.

a. Bumpy landing because Chatanooga didn’t have a runway long enough for us.
b. No-one could deplane, because they didn’t have a deplaning tunnel or a stairway high enough to reach our door. They had to lift the copilot off by a crane so he could do his
visual ground checks before taking off again. There were some people on the plane who
lived in Chatanooga, but they couldn’t get off.
c. After refueling, they started printing out plane’s documents for the pilots to check. The printer ran out of paper. For some unknown reason, instead of loading more paper into the printer, they started reprinting from scratch on a different printer.
d. When our pilot finally got the documents, he discovered that the fuel had been loaded into the wrong tank. It had to be siphoned out and reloaded.
e. All the plane’s documents had to be reprinted.
f. This took several hours of sitting in the very crowded plane in Chatanooga, with no food available.

Note: My own thought was why were we only carrying enough fuel for a “best case” scenario?
Seems extremely risky to me, especially when our destination airport was Atlanta, notorious for delays.

2. We left Chatanooga around 10 pm, about 4 hrs after landing there (difficult takeoff because of short runway), and it was obvious that no-one on that plane was going to make their connecting flights in Atlanta.

3. Arrived Atlanta about 11:15 pm. Delta wouldn’t let us have our checked luggage. All connecting passengers (most everyone) had to get in a queue and be given a rebooking paper, indicating what flights they had been rebooked on. Because we had been sitting at the rear of the plane, we were towards the end of the queue. Then we were told to “go to concourse C, goodbye”, with no more information than that. We trooped over to concourse C where we found the Delta counters were all closed. Apparently, everyone went off duty at their normal time, even though there were still passengers streaming in from our flight. We stood there like flopping fish for several minutes, wondering what to do next, when a Delta employee happened to be walking down the corridor. My sister and I grabbed her and explained our predicament. She was going off duty, but very kindly stopped to help us. She gave us hotel, phone, and meal vouchers, and explained that the rebooking paper we had been given wasn’t actually a ticket, and that tomorrow we’d have to take it to Delta to get tickets for our rebooked flight. She then went home. God knows what happened to the passengers who arrived at concourse C after us.

4. We finally got to the hotel at 15 minutes after midnight and found that the restaurant was closed and the bar stopped serving food at midnight. Needless to say, Delta hadn’t fed us any dinner. Luckily, my sister had two protein bars in her purse.

5. Now is a good time to note that this sole Delta employee was the only one we encountered on either or trip down or back who cared at all what happened to the stranded passengers. In all other cases, they all acted like we were a major annoyance and inconvenience to them. In addition to the prevalent bad attitude, there was a complete lack of information among Delta employees. No one ever seemed to know anything!

6. Our flight out the next day was at 9:30 pm (only one flight/day to Sao Paulo), which meant there was no practical way we could get to Iguazu Falls at all. So I had to get on the phone/email and cancel our (prepaid) hotel at the Falls (no refund), cancel our TAM airline tickets from Curitiba/Iguazu Falls/Curitiba, remake our Sao Paulo/Curitiba reservations, and advise the Curitiba hotel and airport pickup we’d be arriving one day early. That’s when I found out that Delta’s phone allowance was a grand total of 5 minutes!



Way back: As you read this, please note that I was only 11 days out from the major gastro-intestinal operation I had in Brazil, and was carrying a letter to that effect from my doctor. Also remember that we were flying business class, which you’d think would have made a difference--but no.

1. Flight from Curitiba to Sao Paulo uneventful and on time, using TAM Airlines.

2. We were able to use Delta’s executive lounge at the Sao Paulo airport. The flight to Atlanta was due to leave at 9:50 pm, but an announcement said that it was being delayed because the flight crew were stuck in traffic. At 10:20, there was a new announcement that the flight was being delayed because of mechanical difficulties. Then there were various rumors saying we 1) could wait in the lounge and Delta would keep us informed, 2) we shouldn’t wait in the lounge, but should go to gate 4B, 3) we should go to gate 2A immediately, 4) the lounge attendant knows what’s going on, 5) the lounge attendant doesn’t know what’s going on. You get the picture.

At 30 minutes past midnight, another announcement said that the needed parts were being held up in Customs. Around 01:00 am, Delta announced it was going to put us up in a hotel where we should await further information. Delta off-loaded our luggage and we had to go get it. By the time we got our luggage, hotel vouchers, and further info on what to do, and arrived at the hotel, it was 02:30. We would have starved if it hadn’t been for some small snacks in the airport lounge.

3. Next morning, at the Sao Paulo hotel, no-one had any information, no news from Delta, and rumors flying all over. Finally, mid-morning. a hotel employee said Delta had phoned and said they had flown in a different plane and our flight was going to leave at 13:30, so get ourselves to the airport at once! This was extremely bad timing, because a 13:30 departure time meant an arrival time in the middle of the night at Atlanta, thus ensuring that everyone would have to lay over in Atlanta also! Why didn’t they just let us stay in the Sao Paulo hotel and give us an evening departure which would have us arriving in Atlanta in the early am so we could all catch connecting flights?

4. Here’s where the real fun began! We arrived Atlanta after the airport was closed for the night. Delta had to call out Customs and Immigration to process us. Delta went through the same rigamarole re hotel vouchers and rebooked connections, but it was even worse than on the way down. We had to get our luggage and were then told to stand in a line for vouchers and rebooking flights. This line was about 200 people long, and there were 2 agents to process us. My sister went to get our luggage while I stood in line. I finally got towards the front of the line and saw a Delta agent so I asked him a question, and it turned out we didn’t really need to be in the line at all. Because we were business class, all we had to do was go to the hotel and show them our boarding passes. Duh--no-one had previously told that to any of the business class passengers. Unfortunately, it turned out that this agent didn’t know what hotel we were supposed to go to; the business class people were at a different hotel from the cattle class people, but he didn’t know which hotel.

5. In the meantime, the carousel was empty and we hadn’t found our luggage. It finally turned out that someone had offloaded it, mine on one side of the carousel and my sister’s on the opposite side. We had to go through Customs, then recheck our luggage. By now, so much time had passed that most of the passengers had disappeared.

6. We were in terminal E. Delta told us to take the airport train to terminal T, and the hotel pickups were just beyond it. There would be a Delta person there to tell us which hotel to go to.

7. Had to go through Immigration to get OUT of the Delta baggage area (weird airport setup, very old). When we got to the train, we discovered that it stopped running at 04:00 am (it was now 04:15 am). According to a sign, the walk to the hotel pickup spot was 5000’ away (a mile is 5,250’). We tried to get word back to Delta on the inside of Immigration that there was a business-class passenger in distress in the train corridor, but the only response was “we’ll see what we can do.” Turned out to be nothing, of course; no-one from Delta ever showed up to help. We started walking, very slowly, because I really was in quite a lot of distress. About half-way along, we found an abandoned wheelchair, and my sister had to push me the rest of the way, with me holding both our carryon pieces.

8. We finally got to the hotel pickup place, but there wasn’t any Delta agent in sight. However, we recognized a couple of people from business class, and they had heard from another passenger that we should go to the Marriott.

9. Eventually, a Marriott shuttle came along, but the driver didn’t want to take us. He said Delta never uses the Marriott. One of the passengers saw a Delta person about to board a different hotel bus and went running after her and basically forced her to come back with him and talk to the Marriott driver.

10. Finally got to the Marriott and to bed at 5:30 am. Had to get up at 8:30 to get to the airport. My sister had taken care of our connecting flight to Portland (note that my sister handled this, not Delta).

11. Our flight to Portland was late, of course, but at least we got home.

What’s really annoying is that, throughout the entire list of fiascos, Delta’s attitude was “you people are such a bother”. It was better in Brazil than in the USA, however. In the USA, hey were snotty, uninformed, and sometimes deliberately obstructive. If we hadn’t been flying back in the relative comfort of business class, I would probably have been back in the hospital. I was carrying the letter from my doctor, explaining about my recent operation, but every time I needed help and tried to show it to someone, they were even too impatient to read it. However, please don’t think that all my troubles were due to my poor physical condition. All the business class passengers had ample time to get to know each other, and it would have been hard to decide who was the angriest and most upset.