Gadling

Dateline: Iasi, Romania

Hello again. It is I, your intrepid hero/sex symbol, finally writing to you from Iasi, Romania. Despite Delta Airlines’ best efforts at the contrary, I ultimately arrived in Madrid with enough time to travel the roughly six miles from my arriving gate to the departure gate for my flight to Bucharest. Though it was far from being a graceful connection.

After what was eventually a very pleasant unintended 24 hour layover in New York, during which time I was treated to a rocketing motorcycle ride through Brooklyn and Manhattan, sitting in the ‘bitch seat’, clinging to my oldest friend with an intimacy usually reserved for trees during catastrophic flooding, I blasted off for Madrid. Not content at having already left me stranded for 24 hours and f*cked over in regards to onward transport, Delta Airlines attempted to twist the knife further when, after loading us all onto the plane to Madrid, they suddenly remembered that they had repairs to make.

The careful language used during the announcement that we had just been seated on a jacked up plane suggested that they’d known it was busted for a good long time, but due to extraneous circumstances that we needn’t worry about, they had neglected to address the repair until just that moment. At length we were informed that a mechanic was coming over, but then maybe he wasn’t, but then he performed an enormous act of generosity and resolved to perform his primary job functions in a somewhat timely manner and two hours later we pushed back. After a blistering 15 feet of backwards motion, we halted. We had missed our departure window (natch), but fear not, there was only 50 planes ahead of us. Oh wait, only 50 planes when we were eventually invited to join that line, which we weren’t just yet.

Thirty minutes later we moved again, some deft line-cutting ensued and we were airborne a mere three hours late. Had the space-time continuum remained intact and had my now standard knack for misfortune endured, by my calculations, I would have arrived in Madrid about an hour beyond reasonable transfer time, what with immigration, baggage collection, the bus and trains rides involved in changing terminals and the undoubtedly bureaucratic acquisition of new tickets with Tarom after failing to materialize for my reserved flight the previous day. But this was not to be.

Our pilot, already my hero for having somehow moved us from number 50 in line to number six in the airplane taxiing equivalent of a trick play, apparently steered our plane through a tropospheric wormhole, allowing us to somehow make up almost two hours of lost time in the air. We landed in Madrid only 75 minutes after our intended arrival time. Moreover, inconceivably, my suitcase whose whereabouts had not been definitively confirmed for over 24 hours was, as shakily promised, on the plane and was among the first bags to trundle out on Madrid’s baggage conveyor! All connection chores thereafter went relatively smoothly and I flew to Bucharest and on to Iasi without further incident (unless you count spontaneous bursts of medium-loud vulgarity directed toward Delta and Northwest ‘incidents’).

I’d like to finally conclude the matter of my harrowing trip from Minneapolis to Iasi with the following diatribe: I have been abroad and/or traveling continuously for over four years now. During that time I have braved through such black holes of customer service as Paris, Berlin, Iceland and every notable patch of grass in Romania and in all that time I have never been treated as badly as Delta Airlines treated me on this flight. Their startling mismanagement, reluctance of staff to actually interact with the passengers and their adversarial approach to assisting customers they’ve inconvenienced is deplorable at best and criminal at worst. While I was being left to sit with my thumb up my ass for 24 hours in JFK without reasonable shelter or the bulk of my belongings, wondering how I might actually get to Iasi what with me being a no-show for my onward flights on Tarom Airlines, I encountered a never-ending series of proudly useless people. Exactly zero out of the 12-15 people I interacted with during my ordeal acquiesced to my pleas for help or even pretended to be concerned:

Can you do anything to get me to Romania now that you’ve caused me to miss all my flights? “No.”

Can you give me a place to sleep so I’m not forced to sleep on an airport floor? “No.”

Can you give me my suitcase? “Well, I guess, but not until you’ve suffered more.” (I paraphrased that by the look in her eyes at the time, but she actually said something else)

Can you at least tell me where my suitcase is? “I have no way of knowing.”

Can you call someone that does know? “Yes, but I won’t because they won’t answer.”

Since you’ve no idea where my suitcase is exactly, can you give me a phone number that I can call collect from Europe when my suitcase doesn’t turn up in Madrid so I can get someone on the case in New York? “No.”

Can I have a glass of water? We’ve been trapped like rats on this plane for over 10 hours and I’m really thirsty. “No.”

The consistency of these flagrant affronts to customer service seems to indicate a new company-wide movement where customers are made to suffer and pay both physically and financially for any airline debacle short of a plane exploding in mid-air.

Shame on you Delta Airlines. Shame on you for treating your paying customers like prisoners and freeloaders. Shame on you for reorganizing reality so that as long as you’re not guilty of manslaughter, you take no responsibility for the welfare of your passengers. Shame on you for continuing to employ people with social skills that makes them exclusively suitable for jobs in basement corners, where there’s no fear of them actually interacting with another human.

Oh, I haven’t forgotten that Northwest Airlines is at least 50% responsible for this rolling clusterf*ck, but Northwest has been conducting themselves in precisely this manner for over 20 years and their shortcomings are so commonly known in the traveler world by now that to chastise them for unreliability, disdain and horrid customer service at this stage would simply be overkill.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further posturing about how everyone is an idiot except him and idle speculation on which chromosome has been removed from the genetic makeup of Northwest Airlines’ gate agents .