Forthcoming special Delta Air Lines chat
 

Although I have read about your staffing problems at Inside Flyer, I would like to urge you to post the transcript of this Thursday's Delta SkyMiles chat at your earliest convenience.

I know from the boards that several regular Delta posters (including myself) will be unable to attend due to their timezone or travel/business plans. It will be extremely interesting to read the comments of Kevin Pinto and Christine Pierce given the recent issues at Delta. I am at least hopeful that some of their answers will be more illuminating than the form replies that have been provided by DL customer service. Some of us may wish to make futher written responses to the comments of Pierce/Pinto and that would be greatly helped by a rapid transcript.

Thnaks in advance for your consideration.

The good news is that transcripts doesn't require me at all. It's a function of our Interactive Team here and my guess is that they will have the transcript up on Friday morning. Only those things that require my personal attention at slow to come at times.

Hope this is good news to you.

Yes it is, thank you very much. I will look forward to reading all our questions and (hopefully) some good answers from Delta.

Randy, my apologies on how you were treated by some after the Delta Chat. I feel that no one has done more than you to help with the current problems with SkyMiles. Keep up the good work, I for one really appreciate you hard work. I’m with you, I thought I heard something close to MySkyMiles talked about, I would gladly give up all SWU for the chance to use my segment upgrades on L/U class tickets.

Randy, I would just like to know why:

1. So few questions got thru; there were several MINUTES delay between each.
2. Questions similar to mine never made it past your filter. I know I could not be the only one asking tougher questions than what made it onto the screen.

Questions such as:

Why gate agents are empowered to remove all Medallion privileges such as preboarding at their own discretion?

This isn't my forum, so I won't repeat several other questions I made that never saw the light of day. I know others had far more pertinent and tougher questions than I. I'd just like to know why none of them got through?

For addtional post DL live chat comments, see:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum21/HTML/002113.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum21/HTML/002119.html

Randy, in a situation like last night's DL chat, I would have to imagine that no matter what you did, people would complain. The board members have to remember that as moderator, you have to stay as neutral as possible. This was the largest live chat that I have seen on FT, and in fact an experiment and learning process for you. Everyone has to remember that we wouldn't have http://www.saveskymiles.com/ if it wasn't for you.

The 2 biggest complaints raised were that the format was too slow with only 9 or 10 questions asked in 1 hour. Also only 2 of the questions were on the really important issues, and that they never really forced to address them and be pinned down because of the format.

Some suggestions for the future when you have guests appearing:

1)You must have a 2 hour session. Last night all that we did was hit the tip of the iceberg. There are many frustrated people out there this morning.

2)Change the format so that for the 1st hour, you ask all of the questions whether they are pre-submitted or your own. The second hour should then be opened up to everyone in a moderated form, so that it doesn't get out of control. You must warn your guests that you will like a Mike Wallace and will be asking hard hitting questions. No softballs allowed!

3)You have to figure out a way to permit follow-up questions for the entire chat. Frankly they avoided all of the real issues last night because we couldn't pin them down on the facts after they replied with their rehearsed script.

Perhaps you can reach out to DL and invite them back for a timely follow-up chat during the next month, as nothing has really been resolved and explain to them that many of us are ready to leave DL unless this happens. Perhaps the proper location for this chat would be the Save SkyMiles chat room on FT Live. Invite everyone that registered with their email address on http://www.saveskymiles.com/.

Once again I wish to thank you for your efforts, and I know that most of us do appreciate what you have done and are still trying to accomplish.

[This message has been edited by Rssrsvp (edited 01-19-2001).]

Yes, again, thanks Randy for giving this a shot. It's not your fault that Kevin and Christine didn't want to get down and dirty with the issues. It seems obvious to me that they never would have come in the first place if they thought they were going to have to spend an hour answering angry questions (including) mine from 150 elite SkyMiles members. That's not Randy's fault and I don't think people should take it out on him.

Last night was an experiment. That said, it seems clear to me that Delta has no intention on budging from their position. They are clearly not in tune with their customer's needs, have no idea what's going on in the economy, or with their competition. It's sad.

Rssrsvp's suggestions are right on the nose.

Thanks Randy for putting the live chats together. The participants should get better as time goes on.

Hi Randy,

Let me add my own thanks and 2 cents worth (I did not know that there is no cents key on this keyboard..Oh well).

I have to agree on the system being too slow. I did see your comment that you would like to do a "Larry King" interview. I think that this would have been/be the best format to offer.

With pre submitted questions, I am sure you probably had 20 hours of questions. I hope that our friends at Delta did not put any restrictions on what they would allow...if so I would have told them to take a hike!

So for future chats, see if you can get 2 hours. One hour you, the great-omnipotent one, do your Larry King sthick and ask away, the 2nd hour open it up to the floor.

But above all else, see if you can find a faster chat program.

Thanks for trying.

Mikey1003,

If you have a Macintosh, it's option-4. ¢¢¢¢

Can anyone help him for Windows?

Start, programs, accessories, character map. select the ¢ from the selection of characters, (you might have to find a font that has one (times new roman does))

click on select, then copy

Now paste away!

TW

Randy : I think there were two chats on Thursday night. In checking, I can only find the transcript for the first one. And, I am not sure, but I don't think that entire one is there. If there is a space issue, none of us would care if you edited out the trivia contests and instead included real questions.

thanks

The last 20-30% of the transcript of the special Delta chat is missing from the posted transcript.

The transcripts of the 'normal' chats (like the second one that night) always seem to take a few days - 2 weeks to post (rather like FF miles).

I really do not understand the delay. I would think it would be a simple case of copy and paste.

I just don't get it.

But then, these might be the same people that kept posting a notice to read the transcript (in case you were not online tonight) notices throughout the chat. And the same people that asked us to keep questions to three lines.

I really appreciate Randy taking the effort to put this together, but it looks like maybe the staff is shorthanded or unable to follow through. Copy and Paste, less than 3 minutes to post it.

ughhh!!