The kind of thing that helps put DL in the hole they are now in
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I did not have a lot of trouble reserving two BE tickets JFK-TXL-JFK for mid-March using the old Frequent Flyer Miles' M4 award (140K for the two).
When I called to ticket this res, the agents that I talked to screwed around with this thing for about a half hour and then came back to me that since it was for two pax on one award, I would need to ticket it at a DL counter.
It sounded OK to me because I am accustomed to needing to get paper tickets if I have a partner award on a Star Alliance carrier, so I figured out how to leave a little extra time before my flight home from SDF last night so that I could stop at the DL counter which is very centrally and conveniently located there.
Now comes the part that is hard to believe. The agent at SDF know exactly what I needed but had never issued a ticket using the old miles and needed to call ATL in order to get the proper codes, etc. When he called, they put him on hold for about 20 minutes and then he got somebody who spent about 30 minutes giving him detailed instructions which he followed diligently but which completely failed to allow him to issue the tickets.
So the Dodo in ATL finds somebody to hand him off to. This person immediately told him what Dodo had done wrong and informed him that it was a series of errors that were extremely complicated to correct. But correct it she did in the lightning quick time of 25 minutes (and I thought that USAir was a pain in the butt with the 20 minutes it usually took for them to issue the *A paper tickets).
Add it up and you'll see that DL had its agents tied up for more than an hour and a quarter (and I'm not even bothering to count the two on the phone the week before) issuing some free tickets and what is even more bizarre, they were not the paper tickets that I was expecting but merely E-ticket receipts showing the mileage deducted and the (very reasonable) $56 in taxes and fees that I needed to pay for each passenger.
If they didn't need to issue paper flight coupons, my question is why could they not have done this over the phone and saved themselves and me lots of time? Very sad and not really a good signal being sent for the survival of this company.