I was on that flight too and I thought it was strange. I was going to post something here and write a letter to that Customer Advoate to ask them to investigate what happened (send e-mail to:
[email protected]).
Let's both do it!
The bright side was that the door was closed and I think the remaining two flight crew did what they could very well.
Not only this is bad for customer service, I don't even think this is good flight safety - the cockpit crew must be distracted all that time. I thought the FA (the really friendly one named Melanie) was really unprofessional too - not only she ignored serving her passengers, she also ditched her colleagues.
This situation is actually worse because someone had "vandalized" BOTH of the 2 aft lavs - threw tons of paper towels in the toilet. I actually told Melanie this a little while before she went into the cockpit. So, people have to suffer using the aft lavs (I heard someone saying how gross it was).
I think she was there for more than an hour - she came out at 8:00 MST (30 minutes before landing) with a dinner tray and I thought she went in quite some time before 7:00 MST (flight took off at 5:06 MST).
As a result, I think the following service deviations occurred:
1 - they did not do the final drink service
2 - they did not play the sitcom/other short videos
3 - they did not play the merger news
I was on a flight the next day and asked an FA about this. He said some FAs do that and usually he would call to get them out after 20 minutes.
You are right, it is unprofessional and they better do something about this.