Originally Posted by
Goldorak
This is a very classical AF. I have been seeing this countless times. From outstations, they never update the time until the flight has taken-off from Paris. I understand somewhat the logic behind : they want to update the time once they know for sure when the incoming plane will land and taking into account the minimum turnaround time, but it leads often to ridiculous situation like yours and all systems show "on time" while you know it won't be. The problem is that it is preventing teams to start rebooking people in situations where obviously connections will be missed. Note that it also affects flights from Paris as well, but it's harder to detect as you don't always know on FR24 which plane will operate your flight from Paris so you don't always know where it's coming from. I have been giving this feedback for years to AF, but it doesn't change.
Your story is matching with many of my experiences with the TA team : I see them more passive, relying on others (while we know from experience that it doesn't always work), instead or being proactive and creative and ensuring a good follow-up of dossiers. One thing I have also learned from experience : there is no (or very poor) follow-up of dossiers between the teams/shifts. If you called about a problem, once your TA has finished his/her day, and if your problem is still on-going, no one is taking care of it and you should not expect someone else to call you for the follow-up.
At least you had a good recovery with the Pors
che Cayenne (paging
San Gottardo here
); and the hotel booking. I hope the rest of your journey will be smoother.
The Porsche ride was certainly the highlight of the evening, especially that the ride 2G-2F is not too short :-) I wonder how many employees are working for this special service. I talked a bit with the two agents and they said that there was certainly not enough staff to accomodate all Ulti transfers but hope this will change in the future.
Like everyone on this forum I face from time to time some travel disruptions and my strategy differs depending on the airline : Sometimes, I know that I need to do significant homework on my side to get what I need to solve a travel issue and some other times I know the airline system works well and just rely on it. With AF/KL, I don't know how to behave, especially now that I am Ulti for last minute issues : I had cases where I tried to do every possible step to figure out a situation by calling different places etc... and that appeared to be counter intuitive and relying on the "system" was actually better. And some cases also happened when it was the opposite. Like yesterday, we maybe could have push more to be rebooked on the "next flight which departed before ours" but I was hoping that the "system" kept us on that original flight because it was the best option available. But no... I don't think I am the most unaware of how airline booking systems work, I have subscriptions on Expert Flyer and Flightradar which help me to sort out issues most of the time but I am curious to hear how other contributors of this forum would have done this. Maybe as Goldorak said, outstation agents are less proactive than hub staff (especially CDG) and therefore more "homework" needs to be done. As many wrote before, this could be a serious improvement point to the Ultimate program.