Below is a note that I sent to my corporate travel department, documenting the seemingly dishonest practice of allowing customers to schedule flight connections 30 minutes apart that involve propeller planes that never leave on time. Exact dates have been removed and replaced with notation such as [date1], [date1+1] meaning the day after [date1], etc. Recommended as “entertainment” to those with a healthy dose of schadenfreude.
Dear Sir or Madam:
I wish to report excessively poor customer service with Northwest Airlines (hereafter referred to as NWA), specifically its subsidiary, Mesaba Airlines, and NWA’s gate agents and ticketing agents. This pattern of poor service quality has manifested itself on my last three consecutive flights with NWA, to and from Lafayette, LA.
I am attaching supporting documentation showing the boarding passes of my previous three flights on NWA. You will note that the date of the first leg of these flights is during the evening of that day, while the connection leaves the morning of the next day. During the night between these flights, I was required to stay in Memphis,.TN, the location of a NWA hub. None of these stays were caused by weather, but rather the inability of the staff of NWA and Mesaba to prepare their propeller planes to leave on schedule or to provide a paying customer with a seat on a plane.
The latest incident began on [date1], and continued to Saturday, [date1+1]. The flight was from Lafayette, LA, to Columbus, OH. I turned in my rental car at the airport, and checked in ahead of schedule with no incident. The flight was scheduled to leave at 4:15pm, with an expected layover of 30 minutes in Memphis for me to catch the connection to Columbus. The plane departed LFT 30 minutes late. After takeoff, the pilot apologized for the delay and reported that the baggage was not balanced correctly on the plane, and the airport crew rebalanced the plane, causing the delay. The plane, originally scheduled to land in Memphis at 5:55pm, arrived at the gate at 6:15pm. I got off the plane, ran across the tarmac (there is no jet bridge for propeller planes), ran from gate A33 to gate B23, only to see my connection detach from its jet bridge and depart. The B23 gate agent confirmed that I had missed the flight, and began to look for another connection. There was one leaving in 15 minutes back over at Terminal A. I told him I’d run again to catch it, if he would hold it. He said he could not, and that I wouldn’t get there in time. He told me to report to the NWA Customer Service Center. I could not find the CSC inside Terminal B, so I had to leave the secured area to go to the ticket counter. The time was 6:40pm after waiting in the ticket counter line. The ticketing agent said that I had been rebooked on American, departing at 7pm, but since it was in Terminal C, I would have to go through security again, and I would miss that flight. I was rebooked for the next morning, but the ticketing printed me an itinerary, not a boarding pass, so I had to go back to ticketing Saturday morning to get a boarding pass: my E-Ticket was marked so that the self-serve kiosks told me to see an agent. I arrived in Columbus, “on time” at 11:30am local time.
The previous flight took place over Sunday, [date2], and Monday, [date2+1], from Columbus, OH, to Lafayette, LA. I realized something was askew when the boarding pass, printed in Columbus, had no reserved seat designation. The ticketing agent in Columbus said it was OK, that I would get a seat assigned in Columbus. I rode the first leg with no incident. When I arrived at the second gate, the gate agent informed me that the flight had been oversold. The gate agent offered me the following numbers: There were 27 tickets for the flight confirmed with seats. There are 33 physical seats on the aircraft (and NWA never fills them all, as there have always been calls for 2-3 people to volunteer to take the next flight to meet “weight restrictions”). NWA had sold 37 tickets for the flight. I had purchased the ticket just under 3 weeks in advance. Again I spent the night in Memphis. When I reached Lafayette, my baggage had made the trip the previous evening, but I could not retrieve it until the sparse staff completed boarding the next flight and returned to the ticket counter 30-45 minutes later. I reported to work at Lafayette’s Customer Service Center around 12:30pm.
The last consecutive incident, [date3]-[date3+1] from LFT to CMH, proceeded similarly to the incident of [date1]-[date1+1] except that the propeller plane left Lafayette so late that the connection in Memphis had long gone.
The Corporate Policy document 3-0407, “Travel Policy”, states that employees should “Accept the lowest logical airfare that is consistent with business needs”. My question is thus: when an airline consistently advertises that a connection can be made and then does not make the connection because of the way it conducts its business, is it logical to buy that ticket even though it may be the lowest? I have had good experience with connections using NWA’s jet service; it is just this situation where propeller planes are expected to make connections within 30 minutes. When I make my travel plans, I am making a business decision for the company to purchase tickets based on the expectation that the service provider can execute the service. These were not situations where the weather interfered. These are situations where NWA/Mesaba first: chooses to delay the launch of a flight, rather than board it early, to determine what weight adjustments needed to be made to a propeller flight, therefore missing connections, and secondly: chooses to offer a customer a wager, dressed as a promise, that a person will make the flight. The travel web site does not report the success/failure rate of these flights. The field is there in the system; the data just isn’t populated.
Please advise if I, being able to identify what type of plane is being used on a flight on the travel web site, and also being able to look at schedules, can within corporate travel policy avoid connections that don’t seem to be executable. When the travel web site reports that the flight that I would choose is not the cheapest, perhaps I could select the choice that I rejected because of “routings and times”. The immediate positive effect will be that I can meet the expectations of my internal customers that I will be in a certain place at a certain time, without incurring additional costs, such as extra hotel stays and meals per diem. A proactive approach that Corporate Travel might take is to advise company travelers to avoid these inexecutable connections, or apply pressure to airlines to add more time between these connections. Promising something you knowingly can’t deliver seems to constitute a fraud.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any feedback from my corporate travel center in the 3 months since I’ve written this.
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