A few years ago I
had the opportunity to fly to New York last minute
for a weekend filled with Broadway shows and
Manhattan night life. Anyway, the day-of-flight
ticket was way expensive, so I called my cousin who
at the time was a flight attendant for a major
airline that rhymes with Fu-nited. She had these
“friends fly free” vouchers where you go to the
airport and give them your name, and if there’s any
room on the flight, you’re golden. So the flight
out was a dream, it was 7 am on a Friday, like 10
people on the plane (including my four friends who
had planned this trip for months), and I got a first
class seat with breakfast and all that good stuff.
One alcohol-fueled
weekend in New York later…
Sunday was a
whole different story. I got there at 9 am for a 1
pm flight. By the way, this was my wife’s birthday.
Last thing she said before I took this trip, “OK,
just be back for my birthday…” All the flights
seemed to be filling up. One after another. I
didn’t realize if you are on these vouchers, when
you don’t get on stand-by on one flight, you are at
the bottom of the stand-by list for the next flight.
And so on, and so on, all day. That wasn’t the
worst thing though. No one would help me. I’m from
Chicago, so I asked if any flights could get me to
Milwaukee, or Gary, or Madison, or anywhere my wife
could pick me up. No one bothered to look it up. I
asked how much it would be to just BUY a one-way
ticket home. I was told $800. Sheesh….
That’s when I
flipped out and said something horrible about the
financial status of this airline. Apparantly, I made
the desk clerk cry. I went back to my seat, where
it was now about 5 pm. I got to talking to a nice
woman in the terminal, and she told me she was in a
similar situation, so she just went ahead a bought a
ticket. “You spent $800 to get home?” I asked. She
looked at me strange. “No, I paid about $250.”
WHAT?? I stormed back to the desk where a different
woman was working and asked what the price for a
one-way ticket to Chicago was. “About $260,” she
said. I couldn’t believe it. Sold. I bought it right
then and there.
Then the customer
service manager came up to me and asked about my
earlier altercation. I told him what happened, and
even offered to apologize to the woman I heard I
upset. Instead, he took away my voucher and said I
was flying as a representative of the airline and my
cousin was subject to disciplinary action, blah blah
blah. (My cousin later laughed at those suggestions,
she’d been there over 20 years). He tried to take
away my ticket I had just bought, too, and I was
like “Hey, I just paid for that!” He thought it was
a ticket the woman issued me for the voucher. He
almost ripped it up in front of me. Luckily, I saved
it.
So, I was in the
airport for 12 hours. My friends were on a 9 pm
flight, and were surprised to see me still there. I
got to ride home with them. Not in first class, but
I was glad to be out of there. I saw about an hour
of my wife’s birthday.
Geoff
from Chicago