Three hours into my phone call with the Delta Airlines Platinum desk yesterday evening, I started to suspect that something was awry. Wait times on this normally outstanding phone line are usually in the seconds, not hours, and for a delay of this magnitude, something must not be right.
Indeed, while Saturday’s weather at my Hong Kong flat was cloudy and balmy, the snow in the United States was continuing to fall, resulting in countless canceled flights, missed connections, buried airports and subsequent calls to customer service. Investigating the matter deeper, I found similar frustrations at other carriers, with some travelers reporting jaw dropping on-hold times and others saying that they had simply been hung up on.
In short, the airlines’ IT infrastructure can’t seem to handle the number of service calls this weekend. So if you’ve got immediate business, make some time. First, ensure that your issue can’t be resolved over the web or via your travel agent. If they can’t do it and if the need is immediate, call your airline, open a bottle of scotch and turn on the Olympics — it’s going to be a long, arduous journey — and you haven’t even left home yet.
But to the airlines: Has Valentine’s Day 2007 taught you nothing? The snowy debacle that stranded hundreds of passengers in airplanes and airports across the east has been heralded as the perfect model of airline incompetence. By now you should have a disaster-proof mechanism to communicate with passengers in the case of inclement weather — even if it’s outsourced overseas, it’s better than hanging up them. Get it together!