CGNC

The Context: As a DM, I make 4-5 trips to East Africa a year, generally frequenting the same destinations, and flying similar routings. XXX-ATL/DTW/JFK-AMS-EBB/NBO. I'm a veteran of GUC redemptions and generally like to use them heading west-bound when possible. I now know the drill in terms of finding Z availability on Expert Flyer, calling in, asking for those flight numbers, etc. In the past, this has been on par with an Olympic sport. I usually wait until i have no appointments for the next few hours before I call, knowing it might be a bear. And even then, I'm sometimes getting callbacks, etc.

The last three bookings have all resulted in some conversation with a supervisor who is telling me the GUC must be booked in Y, B or M fare and/or you must find availability as a thru fare with KLM, not point-to-point or flight-by-flight. And in each situation, the ticket has been resolved in a different way. Once it was actually done well and I was given SM for my time, another time they offered to just put me in Delta One on the DL segments (w/o GUC redemption) because they could see Z-fare space on KL but not ticket it and another time I ended up nowhere but richer with SMs as a thank you once again for my patience. I called the next day and it was sorted out rather quickly.

Today: I called at 1030a EST and told the agent what I was looking to do, this time using two GUCs, one in each direction. The agent's computer was having issues so she offered to call me back. She did so about two hours later, having done all the research and saying "I can do this, but I have to book you in a Y fare," to which I said that shouldn't be the case, could you take another look. At 1p, she called to say, "Good news! I can do this, let's ticket this now in T class and I'll get everything done. There's Z space on all the international legs." Then came the last call, at 430p, to inform me that unfortunately after now a six hour slog, they couldn't confirm the Z space for upgrades.

The agent was sincere and sounded defeated. When I asked her, she indicated this was the one ticket she'd been working on all day, calling the joint venture desk, international reissue, etc. I almost felt bad for her. She offered to hand me over to a supervisor if I wanted to express my unhappiness with the way these things are being administered, and I did so.

Another 65 minutes on the phone and the supervisor, who also tried to look up another alternative routing where EF indicated thru fare space was available, said she couldn't help. She offered me 20k SM for my inconvenience and asked me to share my complaints at delta.com. I indicated that I had done so on the previous bookings--which she claimed to have pulled up to take a look--and I didn't desire to write a black hole that would return with a form answer that wouldn't really address my issue.

So Delta staff spent the better part of seven hours today working on this one booking, and at the end of the day I don't hold a ticket. This is now the 4th time booking the GUC has turned into a marathon and when I asked if the supervisor could escalate this to someone who could call and talk to me about why this continues to recur, she said no. And on top of that, her insightful wisdom was for me to redeem the GUCs "where Delta flies, not where our partners fly." That would seem to defeat the purpose for someone like myself.

I'm honestly dumbfounded. I value my days at more than 20,000 SkyMiles (or $200) and while yes, I could move my business to another carrier, I genuinely just want the process/system fixed so the good people we call don't spend their entire shifts trying to sort this out. And so that I don't have to gripe that this issue continues to recur.

Has anyone else had such difficult experiences with GUCs of late? Is there something I could do to get the point across to DL that this funny business certainly kills goodwill and their bottom line? If this is what the future looks like, I'm clocking out!