Maybe not as off peak as 2 a.m Sunday, but still off peak for all intents. A fair comparison would be, say, 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Which is less peak? 1:00 PM on Saturday, or 6:00 PM on Friday?

give it a break, is Frontier perfect no, would it be nice if the wait times improve absolutely, but frankly if you have such an ax to grind with RAH and the airline formerly known as Midwest you have made you point. Please move on and let those are us who are still willing to have Frontier win over our loyalty do it without your biased opinion.

Welcome to FT, DC!

To get a feel for what wait times are actually like, I placed 1-3 calls each day at various times to the Midwest reservations number for the past two weeks. In a few cases I held on to see how long the wait time really was, and in other cases I simply noted the estimated wait time. In the cases where I hung on, they were within 3 minutes either direction of the estimated time, so the estimate they offer seems reasonably accurate.

This is obviously just a small sample of all possible call times, and the times chosen were largely based on when I had a chance to call and thought of doing so...not scientifically random. But here's what I found.

date …….... time ……. min ….. day
18-Aug ….. 13:00 ….. 12 ….. Wednesday
18-Aug ….. 16:50 ….. 24 ….. Wednesday
19-Aug ….. 13:57 ….. 19 ….. Thursday
19-Aug ….. 16:54 ….. 20 ….. Thursday
20-Aug ….. 11:05 ….. 46 ….. Friday
20-Aug ….. 14:30 ….. 35 ….. Friday
20-Aug ….. 16:23 ….. 25 ….. Friday
21-Aug ….. 10:20 ….. 21 ….. Saturday
22-Aug ….. 17:55 ….. 24 ….. Sunday
23-Aug ….. 07:05 ….. 00 ….. Monday
23-Aug ….. 10:50 ….. 21 ….. Monday
23-Aug ….. 15:54 ….. 47 ….. Monday
24-Aug ….. 12:55 ….. 15 ….. Tuesday
25-Aug ….. 10:20 ….. 17 ….. Wednesday
25-Aug ….. 19:45 ….. 28 ….. Wednesday
26-Aug ….. 15:34 ….. 09 ….. Thursday
26-Aug ….. 17:14 ….. 25 ….. Thursday
27-Aug ….. 12:51 ….. 07 ….. Friday
27-Aug ….. 17:27 ….. 04 ….. Friday
28-Aug ….. 17:20 ….. 29 ….. Saturday
29-Aug ….. 14:45 ….. 07 ….. Sunday
30-Aug ….. 09:52 ….. 26 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 15:03 ….. 15 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 21:47 ….. 37 ….. Monday
30-Aug ….. 08:17 ….. 10 ….. Tuesday

Only once did I have zero wait, but both the average and median times were 20 minutes. Not necessarily anything to be proud of, but not consistantly disasterous, either.

I did happen to call twice on the afternoon of Friday 8/27, a date brought up in an earlier post, and the wait time was 7 minutes and 4 minutes. Apparently not a peak time at least for Midwest call center demand.

A few days ago it dawned on me that I was calling the Midwest number, not the Frontier number, and the teams are not yet integrated. So for the last five calls I hung up and called the Frontier number. Wait times in all five cases was less than fifteen seconds, and that includes last night when the estimated Midwest time was 37 minutes.

So....this all suggests a few things.

(a) Although the wait times for Midwest are not anything to brag about (and anecdotally haven't been for many years) neither are they always 30-60+ minutes.

(b) Painting the Frontier wait times as awful because of a long wait experienced when calling the Midwest line is off the mark.

(c) Because the Frontier wait times appear to be so much sorter, when the systems are integrated there should be a great deal of improvement.

(d) Because the two platforms are still separate, and it's likely that Frontier people are not being trained on the legacy Midwest platform, the pool of people to work the Midwest calls is small.

The Midwest wait times probably won't improve until everything is in the Frontier realm. When everything is moved to a single platform, there will likely be fallout which keeps the Frontier call center busier than normal for awhile, plus the former Midwest res agents will still be new to the system. But if recent experience with true Frontier wait times is any indication, there will be a marked difference when the integration has passed.

As usual, excellent analysis Knope.Thanks for taking the time. Time will tell if the wait times really do improve.