Korean Air & Delta left us stranded in INC due to severe weather- Thanksgiving 2024
I made a full post in the KE forum:
Incheon airport weather delays Thanksgiving 2024
Portion with relevance to Delta:
Flew HOU-ATL-ICN no problems. It’s now 6am Wednesday. Big storm in Korea. Rolling delays until we finally boarded for BKK. Sat on the plane for about 3 hours. The 3rd hour was due to a passenger being deplaned and they had to offload all the luggage to find his. Finally pushed back and made our way to the de-icing area. It took an hour just to get there. While we were next in line to be sprayed, they made the announcement. Crew has timed out and this fight is cancelled. We’ll be taxiing back to the gate as soon as we can get out of the de-icing line. We sat there another 30 minutes without moving. They announced that they would go ahead and serve the in-flight meal while we were waiting. They never did, and eventually taxied back to the gate. If they hadn't have had to de-pane the one passenger, we would have been in the air before the crew timed out.
Had to go to the Transfer Desk on the 4th floor near gate 247. Unfortunately, I’ve been there before. This time, I was given a number…number 130 when they were serving number 25. I asked if being SkyTeam Elite+ made any difference. Thankfully it did and we were put in a line with only 5 parties ahead of us. Rebooked on a flight leaving about 5 hours later. That flight had rolling delays for hours. Near the very end of the wait, they made an announcement. “This is a gate change announcement. Please proceed to gate 267 for immediate boarding”. RELEIF. My wife and I walked extremely fast half way across the terminal and were the first to arrive at 267. First thing I do is check to see if there is an aircraft at the gate. No, but one is being towed into place. The other passengers start to filter in, but the flight crew and cabin crew that were also waiting at the previous gate never show up. I thought that maybe they got a ride in a shuttle bus or something?
Why did they add a "Y" to the flight number? I noticed they did this on several flights trying to get out of ICN.
The gate agent finally shows up, grabs the mic and says “This flight is cancelled. Please go to the Transfer Desk.” ...? Now every passenger is irate, including myself. Definitely some shenanigans going on. It’s about 3:00am and the Transfer Desk is closed until 6:40am.
At this point, we’d been in the ICN airport 22 hours. Thank god we had lounge access and were able to take showers. I called Delta. They said they could “protect us” on a flight the next (Friday) evening, but I had to first get Korean Air to uncheck us in. I called Korean Air. 2 hours and 15 minutes on hold before they answered. No help at all. They told me to go back to the Transfer Desk.
Now here is the reason I put this in the KE forum. The KE Transfer Desk in Terminal 2 has 3-4 people working it. It doesn’t open until 6:40 am. At 3:30am, there were about 300 people in line. I went back at 5:30 AM and you couldn’t even go up the escalator to get to the 4th floor where the desk is located. 500+ people queued up. If there was a fire, we’d all die from trampling or the fire itself.
A top 20 busiest airport in the world and the Transfer Desk isn’t open 24 hours. No bank of phones to use to call when things go wrong. Even when they do pen, only 3 – 4 agents available. A lot of people were losing their tempers and I understood why. I get it. Weather events are not the responsibility of any airline, but Korean Air is very poorly equipped to handle the inevitable.
At one point I had KE and Delta on a 3-way call. One would put the other two on hold and play their hold music. Made it very difficult to talk with Delta when the KE hold music was playing and vice versa. I had to beg the KE agent to stay on the line with me while Delta put us on hold. I finally thought I had it all sorted with Friday evening flights booked to BKK. I went back to the lounge, logging into my KE account and saw the Friday flight pending.
Took another shower, logged in again and the Friday flight is gone. I didn’t dare try and call KE back. I called Delta and they said KE cancelled our seats. Next available flight December 5th…7 days later!
F that! I asked the lounge dragons how to get the hell out of the airport. The answer, “Sorry sir, not possible. You need to go to the Transfer Desk”. I wanted to cry.
My wife is Korean and it helped a lot with translation. I then recalled what we had done on previous trips to Thailand where we had (purposely) long layovers in Incheon to meet my wife’s family. I negotiated my way down to the bottom floor (just happens to be almost directly below the 4th floor Transfer Desk) and asked if I could go backwards through the transfer security checkpoint and exit the airport. The Immigration Officer said “yes”. Called the wife who was still sat in the lounge and told her to start packing. We went back to the security checkpoint and proceeded to make our way out backwards past the metal detectors/xray. They were asking everyone attempting the same if they had ever entered Korea before. Made it sound like this was a 1-time exception. I told him we had entered Korea last year for about 12 hours, but he still let us out.
Proceeded to Immigration and entered the country. My Immigration officer was a little confused until I explained to him that we were actually on a plane and made a tour of the airport for 5 hours before returning to the terminal.
Luggage. The baggage claim area was a sea of suitcases. My wife started scouring while I got in line at the counter. I spoke to a KE luggage agent and they said I had to get into the Delta line (long) and talk to them. I explained that our bags got onto a KE flight and we did a tour of the airport for 5 hours. Didn’t matter so I got in the Delta line. My wife walks by and says some employee told her she should look at carousel 9 so she went that direction. As I’m waiting in line, I noticed there are papers on the wall with flight numbers and corresponding carousel numbers. The last flight we were rebooked on was KE659 and the paper showed that carousel 7 corresponded to it. I called my wife and told her to search at 7. She found both our checked bags.