Yes they are often pretty useless these days.

For a schedule change, I wouldn’t bother calling until the end of the weekend. Schedule change Saturday combined with the C team of agents is a recipe for poor outcomes

Oh. Then definitely call in over the next few days. There is no emergency requiring you to use the useless chat feature.

I've had online chat agents perform numerous tasks without issue, so I would not say they are all "useless". Do you mean you were rebooked LAX-SLC-CVG? (Being rebooked from LAX-ATL-CVG to LAX-SLC-ATL makes no sense). Assuming your asked to be rebooked back to LAX-ATL-CVG and the connection at ATL was under 4 hours and thus legal?

My typo, not fixed in my post. Yes, under 4 hours. Per the wisdom upthread, it looks like the schedules are still loading. The seat map on ATL-CVG only shows one row of comfort +

IME, they don't know policy, don't understand what you are asking for, and won't do it even if they do. And they are helping multiple customers so even if you answer a question immediately in real time, you're waiting after every answer you give. I haven't been impressed since the good old Twitter days.

Definitely just wait until after the weekend until schedule change Saturday and its aftermath passes. Call early or middle of the week during normal business hours and you have the best chance of getting a good (or at least better) agent. It could’ve been just the chat agent not knowing what they were doing (most likely) or they might not have seen the routing in their system yet. It also could be a married segment issue, which CAN be overridden for already existing itineraries. Some agents don’t know this, and I have had to politely escalate to supervisors to get my originally booked route back when the computer made a mess of it. It is worth noting that if this is indeed the case, keep a close eye on your itinerary during future schedule changes to make sure the computer doesn’t kick you out the routing again. I’ve had it happen 3 or 4 times in a row before it finally stuck.

IME (trying to move the dates of a US-UK trip forward by two weeks so I could attend my Dad's funeral without spending more skypesos) the online chat agents didn't know they could do what I was asking for even when I got a supervisor involved. However, a phone agent could and did do what I was asking for.

In my experience, you have to be extremely detailed and specific about what you want/need when using the chat. I wouldn’t call it useless because I have had quite a bit of positive experiences with this tool.

What does this have to do with online chat?

yes

(I didn't read the OP, just the title, but however useless they were, yes, they are typically that useless)

If you’re lucky, it’s only useless if you’re unlucky it will destroy your reservation and you will spend couple hours of on the phone to get somebody to fix it.


because they’re working on several chats at the same time they run a big risk of missing you up

I pretty much suggest using chat for nothing besides asking what time and date is 😂

Yes, the chat is completely useless.
Be careful using while airborne.
A colleague of mine was reprimanded when he went apes—t on them while in flight.
So somehow they can escalate if they feel abused or threatened, but have done ZERO to help me and others (other than cancel out entire itineraries).

Well, chat eventually got me onto my correct flights.

but can someone explain this seat map (with regard to comfort +)?

https://onemileatatime.com/news/delt...ing-737-900er/

ah yes, the ACTUAL problem with the chat is that you're not allowed to be as abusive to the employees as you want to be. OK.