climmy

Wasting away at the CLE Club right now on an 8 hour delay. CLE-SFO going mechanical.

Not complaining at all, things happen. However, I've had a run of bad luck lately and every time I try to get another routing, everything just comes back zero's from EF...United and/or CO.

For example, I tried today to skip the non-stopper and try for ANYTHING !

Via:
LAX
DEN
IAH
ORD
EWR
SEA

Zip. Zilch. Nada. I always thought October was the slow month. Not anymore.

Anyone else finding just generally super-full flights cuasing difficulty in re-routing or re-booking?

Incidentally, I thought I might even punt and go tomorrow. Zero's already there too. Bummer.

WineCountryUA

yeap, and the airlines are loving it
Airlines load factors

WIRunner

Weather in the Midwest certainly is not helping.

sbm12

Sustained LFs above 80% are generally bad for customers specifically because of the issues they present with IRROPs situations. The airlines basically have to gamble that the flights will operate consistently enough often enough that they can minimize those situations. And when they cannot they end up refunding a lot of tickets which is rather costly. So they are betting that they can keep the cash from selling those seats and not have to refund them and annoy customers at the same time.

demkr

This has been SOP on all airlines for me for years. It's alleviated a bit when you live or are flying from a hub city on the hub airline, because reroutings are easier.

I had a flight booked on AA in May from SFO-ORD-MSP. Because of aircraft taken out of service for hail damage at DFW, my SFO-ORD leg got cancelled. AA could not get me to MSP for 3 days. I said screw it and ended up buying an F ticket on DL to get there (UA also had availability-but was much more expensive).

So i think that although its a difficulty because of the load factors, I at least find comfort that the airlines are able to fill their planes, make money, and maybe have more frequencies in the future if the route is profitable

climmy

Well, I did make it home but not without exceeding 16 hours gate to gate. Pretty horrible for a simple single-connect SDF (Louisville) to SFO with a stop in CLE.

Anyway, how CO couldn't conjure another aircraft at a home hub is a disappointment. I guess that's another issue.

About 16:00 CO announced another delay, this time to 17:55. The crew was going to time out at 18:00. Wishful thinking to get off the gate 5 minutes before timeout. The writing was on the wall that it was going to cancel which it eventually did.

I asked the CO agents (various ones: Club, Out at regular check in, at the gate, etc etc.) a few times during the day to see about a re-route and re-book. As mentioned in my earlier post, everything SEEMED to be impossible.

As a last ditch effort, I called the 1K desk. Much to my surprise, the 1K agent asked me to hand my phone to the GA. Wham-O. 5 Minutes later I was on another, albeit connecting flight to get me home.

Now I don't want to degrade into another IRROPS handling CO vs UA thread, but that's unfortunately EXACTLY what it ended up being. I mean CO is nice an friendly about it, but UA got me results. Full stop. If I hadn't called the 1K desk, I'm sure I'd be rolling in the front door....about now!

Thanks UA, because of your 1K agents I was able to sleep in my own bed.

...Paging channa

channa

You rang?

Nothing new here. Not sure what the issue was -- whether CO's lousy systems simply discouraging the agent from wanting to help you, or whether they really didn't see anything, or they were only looking for CO flights or whatnot.

Either way, your experience parallels mine. Let's hope we don't degrade to CO service levels in IRROPS.

Another tactic, especially in a small airport like CLE is to have UA pull the ticket from CO. The trick is to keep CO out of the IRROPS rebooking process.