Originally Posted by
The Situation
This past week I overheard a significant number of complaints by FAs ranging from the ridiculous gate situation in SEA to non-catering flights out of SLC. On a different flight, while I was waiting for the lav, I was talking to the FAs in the galley. Unprompted, one of the FAs asked me and the pax exiting the lav if we noticed a change in DL. She asked me to write in to DL, because they listen to customers, not employees. Having endured the wrath of US employees when they were upset with management, this is too rapid and significant a change to be explained by incompetence - they are absolutely upset with management. Given the body language, employees seem burned out. I am sure they have heard a lot of complaints from customers and are getting fed up with it.
These two issues - the SLC catering disaster and the SEA overcrowding - have both come to a head this summer. I've felt the pain acutely on both, and I imagine it has to be bleeding over into the employee experience.
In SEA a week ago, I watched my flight get delayed by 2 hours (!!!) waiting for a gate even after the aircraft had landed, causing me to have to get rebooked onto American because of a missed connection. I also imagine a lot of rebookings happen for folks stuck in the security zoo that can take an hour or more to clear these days without any special program memberships: I actually witnessed people paying to sign up for CLEAR just so they could not miss their flight. That has to take its toll on the ground staff.
And for all of my flights that have touched SLC, the catering mess has been terrible. Drink carts are barren, I've had flight attendants say they can't serve PDBs because the catering hasn't arrived yet, and the food that does make it onboard is some of the most grim cuisine I've seen this side of Kitchen Nightmares. (The turkey sandwich onboard regional flights ex-SLC is one step removed from Fyre Festival catering. In the wrong direction.)
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that there's a national problem with labor relations (and certainly not based on the relatively minor complaints OP has that are more just everyday customer service issues). But I do think that in the West region, there are some major operational problems right now. Once the summer travel season is over, Delta needs to regroup and get a plan together to fix both before the holidays hit and another meltdown occurs...