An anguished CRC member was on the phone to DL, relating his latest tale of woe involving a Skywest GA denying him and his daughter boarding on the last flight of the night from SLC to Sun Valley, Idaho, despite the plane sitting at the gate for 15 minutes thereafter before pushing back, and apparently not giving them a hotel voucher or doing anything else for them. According to him, the GA told him that it was Skywest's policy not to hold flights for connecting passengers past the scheduled departure time. He reported that he had paid $685.00 for an RT PDX-SLC-Sun Valley, and that he has been doing this weekly for the past few months. He seemed to be choking back tears as he was speaking. He told the DL employee at the other end of the phone that most flyers in the Sun Valley market are upset with DL/Skywest, and would leave for another airline immediately if there was another choice. I really felt bad for this gentleman.

Why can't DL/Skywest exercise some common sense on "last flight of the night", particularly to small airports like Sun Valley? Clearly, they have ways of knowing whether their passengers are connecting through SLC or originating. Why can't they wait a couple of minutes if they have determined that their passengers are en route to the connection? Why can't the GA make a page? Assuming the veracity of the man's story, the Skywest GA's actions smack of meanness.

I had an opposite experience on DL/Skywest yesterday. Because of horrific traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the normal 30 minute trip from downtown DC to BWI took 90 minutes, and I got to the DL counter 28 minutes before departure, which meant that DL would have been within their rights to cancel my reservation. The kind DL agent gave me a BP and checked my bag, which was the fifth one off the belt in OAK. I had a great flight on DL1771 (BWI-SLC), and, despite a weather-induced delay for my inbound connecting flight (DL 4015, BHM-SLC-OAK) and ended up with an almost 3 hour layover in SLC (CRC bar has 14 beers in bottles and 4 more on draft, and 5 different wines), got nice treatment by a male FA on DL 4015, which ended up reaching OAK on the stroke of midnight.