Alternate title A: “Good god, I’ve been bumped (or as I like to call it — ‘getting royally shafted by a corporate airline with no soul’)”

Alternate title B: “SXSW, here I co….wait, just one second there, padna!”

Customer service is dead. (Almost).

After years of hearing about the trend of airlines overbooking and thinking it was urban legend or something that only happened to people who had done something truly heinous in a previous life, it happened to me. Actually, it happened to me and five (it was thought to be four, but we caught up with the fifth later) other randomly chosen unfortunates, by the evil trolls that live deep within the bowels of United Airline’s computer reservations mainframes.

Apparently, it’s not good enough anymore to simply make a reservation with an airline. As I learned today, this does not guarantee you will get a seat on a booked flight. Even if you show up almost 3 hours early, make it through security without a hitch and have the luxury of time of your side, you may unwittingly be doomed. Walking up to the ticket gate around noon, I had no doubt I’d be boarding for my 12:30 flight to Austin. Nothing in previous travel experiences had alerted me to the fact that this could ever happen. I knew flights got overbooked and people could volunteer to skip in exchange for comps, but I hadn’t realized the extent of it and how unaware airlines really are when it comes to factors like conventions and the fact that overbooking is a shady business practice.

One of the five, David, a VP at a DC PR firm, and I struck up a comraderie and honed in on the fact that no other business that we could think of does this. Would a cruise ship overbook? Amtrak? A Greyhound bus trip? Not likely. I’ve never heard of it. How could a business survive with so many infuriated customers? Nonetheless, this highly annoying inconvenience has an upside. I was able to strike up engaging conversations with the other five poor souls, a chance meeting that otherwise may not have happened.

When we were told to go stand in the “other” line, the one that wasn’t boarding, I didn’t have much cause for concern. Even though my ticket has some oddly-worded corpor-o-speak instead of the usual “Boarding Pass”, I still thought that I would be issued a pass and all would be well. I started to get concerned when the entire plane had boarded and we were still standing there. Once the announcement came that the flight was fully boarded, I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The rude woman at the gate told us we’d have to go to customer service. To me, this was unacceptable. Why was my seat taken? You mean I never had a seat? What? Why would I book a reservation and not have a seat? What kind of under-handed tactic is this? I am a paying customer. I paid to leave at a specific time. My company paid for me to be at a conference, with a hotel and car waiting. Everybody except the airline loses money. I lose hours of my life I can never get back. Whose grand vision of enterprise is this? And so it was. So, off to customer service we went. A long walk, mind you. Not even a cart to shuttle us.

Like ol’ Rodney Dangerfield himself said, “No respect!” Upon arriving at the counter, they were aiding Christopher, an Outreach Director at a Washington-based museum. Christopher soon shuffled off. The rest of us, a new friend from PBS, Virginia Miracle, Dave and I all walked up to the counter at the same time, since we all were in the same situation. The poor woman at the counter was clearly overwhelmed and insisted on helping us one-by-one. That didn’t stop us from listening in and commenting our frustration from the sideline. Our PBS friend wanted to bail out, but we insisted she go to the conference, so she opted to fly out the next day. Virginia also wanted to bail out and did just that, which she seemed fine with. David arranged to make a connecting flight from Denver, of which only one was left. He was very nice about it. I had no qualms there. It was the airline that was at the center of my frustration.

When it was my turn, the staffer insisted there was nothing she could do. She didn’t even offer to find me a flight the next day. This was completely unacceptable, so I did my best Clint Eastwood (sans gun and hat) and asked politely, but firmly for the manager. After a good long while, he showed and proved that there is sanity left in airline management. His calm demeanor and assuredness put me at ease. The new flight and confirmed, now located in first class, and comp ticket didn’t hurt either. So what if it’s 5 hours away.

If there’s a takeaway from all of this, I learned two ways to ensure this will never happen again (courtesy of United supervisor Benny Mac.)

1. Always use the online check-in option 24 hours ahead of time (available on most major U.S. airlines)

2. Use a hidden airline caveat by requesting what is called “pre-confirmation” way in advance.

3. Always ask to speak to a supervisor. This way, if you are insistent on achieving something that cannot be routinely done by customer service staff, you will fare better overall. The first class upgrade was an unexpected perk, but my mission was that “I simply had to fly today.” Period. (Side note: there were several empty seats on my flight. And they said there was “nothing today.” Hmmm.)

So, nearly 10 hours later, I arrived in Austin. And with that, now I’m ready for SXSW (especially since as I write this a security detail is outside my room trying to peel a drunkard off of the hallway carpet — woo hoo! who needs sleep anyway?).

Tags: airline, airlines, austin, sxsw, texas

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:16 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.