To add my limited experience to this....

A few weeks ago I flew PDX->IAD->PDX (actually PDX->ATL->IAD->DTW->PDX) after buying coach and then paying for the FC upgrade (which is a funny story in itself).

It turned out to be "one of those trips". On the PDX->ATL leg, my IFE screen went black at the end of the safety video, and never came back on. The flight attendant said that she had rebooted it 3 times and couldn't take time to mess with it anymore. What really sucked was that I never bother to use the entertainment system because I have never really found headphones that work well with my hearing aids. Just before this trip, I found some. Then I couldn't use them. Anyway, that was a minor annoyance on Monday.

Friday evening, I arrive at the gate for my flight home. Scheduled boarding time comes and goes, but nothing is going on. About 10 minutes later, the Gate Agent gets on the PA and says that they are having a little problem because one of the passengers on the incoming flight (which had apparently arrived and deplaned before I got there) had gotten a piece of luggage stuck in the overhead bin.

I am not worried, at this point, even though I only have a 55 minute layover in Detroit.

About 10 minutes after that, the pilots comes up and gets on the PA. He says that a passenger has gotten a guitar case stuck in the closet. Apparently it shifted during flight, and now they can't get the door to open to get it out. He says that the passenger tried to get it out, then the flight attendants, the Gate Agent went down and gave it a shot, and he himself had tried. No luck. They had called for Maintenance to come look at it.

At this point the Gate Agent had started calling up passengers who were obviously going to miss their connections, and from what I could overhear, was rebooking them on other airlines - this was the last flight of the day to DTW.

Finally, at about 45 minutes past scheduled departure, the pilot came back up and said that the good news was that Maintenance had been able to get the guitar out of the closet. The bad news was that they did so by chopping through the closet door with a fire axe. The further bad news was that they were going to have to fix it before they could fly, per FAA regs.

The gate agent called me up, to see what they could do about getting me home. She rebooked me on a flight through MSP that would only cause me to be about an hour late, but one of the other agents looked over her shoulder and said that she couldn't book a 22 minute connection for me. Then she told me that she would put me up in a hotel in Dulles and fly me home first thing in the morning. At this point, my original flight to DTW is boarding. THEN she says, you know what, I will just send you to Detroit on your original flight, and put you up overnight there...

She hands me a boarding pass with an economy seat on it. I had been quiet and calm up to that point. Sometimes weird stuff happens. I said "I had a first class seat on that plane right behind you, before you started messing with it. Why do I have to move to coach?" So, she fixes that.

She tells me that they are now waiting on me to close the door, so she wants me to check in with the gate agent at DTW for my hotel voucher.

Of course, half of my plane is trying to get something for their trouble once I get to DTW, but they eventually got me a voucher for a Days Inn. Here's a tip - do NOT stay at the Days Inn. Free is *way* too expensive. I am not especially picky, and I was close to horrified by what I saw in that hotel....

Finally made it to PDX at about noon on Saturday, after a brief detour to SLC on the way.

I don't normally complain about stuff, but in this case, it seemed like they dropped the ball every time they touched it. I used the Comments/Complaints link on Delta.com to explain what had not gone well, and that I was surprised and disappointed. About 2 hours later I received a nice email apologizing for the problems and crediting 20K miles to my account. I would have been happy with the apology, so the miles were definitely a bonus.