It was with considerable satisfaction, therefore, that I succeeded last weekend not only in goading an airline into redeploying a few employees to help out myself and several dozen other passengers who had been stranded overnight at Chicago’s O’Hare International, but in demonstrating first-hand to top airline officials a measure of the discomfort and inconvenience that they routinely visit upon legions of paying, and often loyal, customers. There are lessons here for all travelers. But first, the story.
In full compliance with airline rules and government recommendations, I arrived at American Airlines’ O’Hare terminal last Sunday with my wife and 11-year-old son at least two hours before our scheduled 6:05 p.m. departure to Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Check-in was swift and routine. Queues at security checkpoints were congested, but we got through with minimal intrusion on our dignity. No explosive swabs were applied to our bags and we did not have to take off our shoes for the newly-employed Federal government screeners, who seemed more polite, diligent and efficient then their privately-employed predecessors.
Things began to go wrong almost as soon as we reached our designated gate. First we were told that our flight had been moved to another gate. After waiting a while at the new one, we were advised to return to the original gate. Finally, at about the time the plane was due to begin boarding, we were moved to a third gate. A few minutes after the scheduled take-off time, we were advised our flight would be delayed for an hour. Thirty minutes later we were told that our flight had been canceled because of bad weather on the East Coast. (This was the night that deadly tornadoes ripped through a swath of mid-America, from Ohio to Alabama).
Disregarding assertions from ticket agents that they might be able to get us out on a later flight, I immediately phoned the airline’s toll-free number and asked them to re-book us for a flight the next morning. This turned out to be a prudent step, since no American flights to Washington left O’Hare that evening. Then I went down to the baggage area to retrieve our two pieces of luggage. The polite lady at the baggage desk said our bags should be off the plane and in our hands in around an hour.
Two hours later, there was no sign of our luggage. Meanwhile, other passengers whose flights had been canceled were also lining up to retrieve their bags. This made me wonder how serious an effort the airline was making to find this luggage. To my dismay, a supervisor at the baggage counter–who told me he worked for a contractor, not the airline itself–informed me that American had assigned only two employees to hunt for the bags of stranded customers, who now numbered in the dozens.
I went upstairs to the American ticket counters to find a supervisor. None was available. But after considerable badgering, I did manage to obtain the name of a man who was described to me as the top American Airlines executive at O’Hare. The only phone number airline personnel would give me to reach him was the number for airline headquarters in Dallas. On a Sunday night, the only response I could get from the headquarters was a series of irritating voice mails advising me to call back during weekday business hours.
After another half-hour of waiting, I decided it was time to break through the fog of airline obfuscation. A couple of calls to information operators disclosed that a person with the same name as the American Airlines executive lived in a town not far from O’Hare. I called the man’s home, got him on the phone, and informed him that I was an angry customer who had been informed by his underlings that my bags were being delayed due to a shortage of American Airlines personnel. He hung up on me.
I phoned him again. He denied he had deliberately hung up the phone and insisted he was going to do something about the problem. After another fifteen minutes of waiting, and no visible progress, however, I decided to step up the pressure. I handed out the airline exec’s home number to a couple of angry people in the crowd who had been waiting for their bags as long as I had, and encouraged them to make their views known to the executive. After noting that at least one other passenger had made a call, I then rang the American exec back. This time he sounded a bit harassed and asked for my name. Figuring I had nothing to lose but my liberty (after all airlines have been known to order the arrest of awkward passengers), I gave it to him.
Within five minutes, I heard a public-address announcement summoning me to the baggage counter. When I got there, instead of the cops, I found the top American Airlines manager on duty at O’Hare along with two senior supervisors (including someone who appeared to be in charge of the baggage department). Within ten minutes, these officials had begun to retrieve, and put out on baggage carousels, the luggage of passengers on several flights that had been canceled. One of my bags was first off the carousel, though it took nearly another hour for my second bag to come up from some remote vault in the terminal, where it apparently had been placed for shipment to Washington the next morning.
After seeing the delight on the face of an elderly woman who had finally retrieved her bag, I felt a bit like Robin Hood. The airline supervisor reluctantly agreed with me that it was disgraceful that I should have had to go to such lengths to obtain what should have been standard service. I urged him to make an apology to all of the angry passengers milling around the baggage carousel. It took another ten or fifteen minutes before the announcement finally was made. (A few days later, an American spokeswoman offered the airline’s apologies to me on behalf of their people in Chicago and said that in bad weather, “things don’t always go as planned.”)
One of my fellow customers, who also phoned the American official at home, said that when he was rude and unhelpful to him, he told the exec that he doubted he would ever fly American Airlines again. The airline official told him that might be for the best. My fellow customer said it did not surprise him that so many U.S airlines are having financial troubles–American itself announced just last Thursday another round of cost cutting.
Phoning a top airline executive during your own trip from hell isn’t necessarily practical. They’re hard to find and tough to get on the phone (I was fortunate to find mine at home). But the fine art of complaining to the right person is one that should be cultivated by airline consumers. And with carriers demanding more financial help from federal taxpayers, perhaps you should also phone your Congressman.
