Liar liar pants on fire
 

So do your coworkers call you names?

My flight last night was an over an hour late, making my connection thisclose. I called the medallion phone number from the orig. city, and the service agent assured me the flight would be held.

The FA also reassured those with close connections that the “gate agents are aware.”

Of course, I didn’t make my flight. It left right on time, and I missed it by 5-10 minutes.

As I am being given my hotel voucher at the service desk, I asked about the “We’ll hold the plane for you” line.

The reply (by two different SAs): “Oh, they lied.”

Yeah, that’s rich. I mean, it’s bad enough DL couldn’t hold the last flight of the day flight with maybe 30-50 people on it just 10 minutes, but the fact the one SA is calling another a liar to a pax is rather unbelievable.

I can’t recall ever having called a coworker a liar, and if I had, it certainly wouldn’t be to anyone outside the company. I thought that was a rather lame thing to do. I was screwed, but there was no call to rat out a co-worker in the process.

As an aside, I can’t imagine working at the Comfort Suites in ATL and having to deal with irate and exhausted people from 10:30-whenever several times a week.

The only bright flight news of the weekend was the Comair FA on the departure leg was one of the nicest and most efficient I’ve seen.

Yes, this is poor behavior by Delta and their agents. Unfortunately, they pretty much stopped holding "last flights of the day" years ago because their "on-time" rating was suffering. Frankly, I'd rather a lower "on-time" rating and a held flight. That's what we get when the government gets involved trying to run industry :rolleyes:

Still Delta should have just been up-front and told you all at the beginning that you'll be stuck for the night. They never do that though.

Well, the gate agents were aware. They just make a calculated decision on what to do. I have heard it from Delta and every other airline I have been on. "They will hold your connections", when in reality, they don't do so often.

What is an SA?

Service Agent?

In this instance, service agent. Didn't know the proper term.

I wish DL had just been honest and told me I'd miss my connection. I'd have much preferred to reschedule and sleep in my own bed one more night. My dog would have liked that, too.

am reminded of a incident I witnessed a few years ago.

pre 9/11 I was in ATL's Terminal E waiting to greet a friend who was inbound at the gate.

the arrival gate still had the outbound flt at it when i arrived so it was already obvously late in departing. the flt was still boarding, so I sat down and waited, while keeping an eye on the board to see if the inbound would be re-directed to another gate.

this is what I saw:

5:10P - final boarding was called (flt scheduled to depart at 4:45P)
5:12P - gate agent walked the paperwork down the jetway
5:14P - jetway pulled back
5:15P - 26 ppl arrived at gate from late connecting flt - out of breath, obviously making mad dash to make the flight

5:16P - gate agent calls plane to ask Captain to board late arrivals
5:16:15P - Captain refuses

5:16:45 - gate agent announces Captain's decision
5:16:46 - late arriving passengers make several loudly audible responses to Captain's decision

5:16P - 5:34P - ramp crew continues to load luggage into plane's cargo holds

during same time frame, observed many of the 26 late arrving passengers approach the terminal window facing the cockpit to render multiple single finger salutes, Italian salutes and many many tongue sticks.

ya gotta wonder what Captain Jerkwad was thinking since his departure was already mucked up.

I can't help but hope he took early retirement and lost 50% of his pension.

Now see if there names were "Uchenna" and "Joyce" they would have pulled that jetway right back up ;)

(btw I'm so glad they won over Romber, I couldn't stand those two!)

Although in a perfect world, we would all love it if an airline would hold a flkight an extra 20-30 minutes for arriving connecting passengers, there are some good reasons when doing so would have ramifications down the line. Sometimes, the last flight out of an eastern hub headed towards a west coast city needs to be turned around on arrival to become an eastbound red-eye flight. So delays to that aircraft can affect the eventual departure time of the red-eye flight and all those passengers with eventual connections.

Secondly, there are crew duty time issues often at play. The flight crew may be nearing its legal duty time towards the end of the day. Then there may also be an issue where if the flight arrives at its destination late because it was held for connecting pax, then the next morning's flight may be delayed because of minimum crew rest issues.

I suspect that these decisions are made at a higher level than the GAs or even the pilots.

A lot of the decision does, however, with crazy rules -
1) On-time departures. What passenger really cares about on-time departures? I'd much rather have a flight with a 30% ontime departure rating and a 80% on-time arrival than the one with 80% ontime departure and 30% ontime departure.
2) Crew work rules and crews going 'illegal'. Sure, this has some good intentions. But, just because a plane has closed the door and pulled out to sit for 30 minutes, they can be legal, while if they sat with door open, they would be illegal? This adherence to 'door closed' does nothing to increase safety.

I have had this happen many times on DL. The only airlines that I can trust about holding a flight is WN. WN has never lied to me... although often times they say they don't know. Part of the whole DL culture is to make the customer happy, even if it is by not telling the truth. Problem is, this behavior is far worse then telling the truth and one of the reasons so many people dislike DL, you can not trust them.

We're talking about delaying a plane with many passengers for one late arrival? The needs of one person are more important than the needs of many? :(

In this case the need of one person is NOT THE ISSUE. The issue is that DL makes up answers knowing they are not true. Other airlines do this as well, but I find of all the US airlines (main line) DL is the worst. Of the commuters, ASA is the worst, AA/Eagle is number two.... TSE was number one but they are basically no more.

Now in fairness to ASA, they really do not lie, they just reach into a brown bag and take out an answer, so sometimes it may appear as a lie, but they are too stupid to understand what the answer is anyway.

I seriously dobut any of the phone agents could be aware of what the gate agent's intentions were - particularly well in advance of departure time.

Taking their word for something they have no control over was a mistake.

When I worked for another major airline in reservations/customer service, many agents would tell passengers whatever they wanted to hear so they wouldn't have to deal with it. It got pretty old when customers would then become very irate when they found out the truth. And it's pretty hard to cover for an inept one. I don't blame the customer service agent for telling it like it was. In reality, no one can promise a flight will be held and in my experience they usually are not.

This is so correct! Worse is when a gate agent tells you they are holding the flight and you run over to another concorse and they tell you they were never holding the plane. DL has lost control of their employees and it seems to get worse year after year. One of the keys to WN's success, you know what to expect and they do not lie to you.