Thank You, Delta

I’m taking back everything bad I said about Delta Airlines last spring — well, how about half of it?

I was in Huntsville, AL this week on business.  On the way down on Monday they “lost” my bag.  Ok, they didn’t actually lose it — they knew where it was the whole time, I’m assuming, since I was told it didn’t make it to HSV because “there was no room in the baggage compartment for it.”  They really told me that.  It showed up at my hotel around 8pm, just in time for me to not make the trip to Walmart for clothes for meetings the next day.

My meetings ended early on Thursday so I headed out to the airport to see if I could get an earlier flight home.  It was there that I discovered that my 6pm flight had been cancelled and I had very few options for getting home.  After checking some stuff out, the desk agent booked me on all of the following:

• Standby:  1:30pm to Atlanta
• Standby:  3:15pm to Atlanta
• Confirmed:  4:45pm to Atlanta
• Confirmed:  6:55pm to Baltimore (in case I made either Standby)
• Confirmed:  9:30pm to Baltimore

I didn’t make either of the two standby’s but did have a confirmed seat on the 4:45 to Atlanta — unlike 15 of my fellow cancelled passengers who got to play the standby game too (this is my reward for being the first on my flight to book alternate plans).  The 4:45 landed 10 minutes early, but the gate agent told me I didn’t have a prayer of making the 6:55 because I was standing at B Concourse and had to get to E Concourse in 10 minutes.  But I did it — I couldn’t breathe and was fumbling for my inhaler, but I got there before the door closed.

Problem:  I was at the gate and had a “Interrupted Travel Itinerary” in my hand showing I was confirmed for a First Class seat, but my name was not on the manifest.  The gate agent told me there was nothing I could do.  I asked her why I had something in my hand showing I was confirmed if I wasn’t on the list.  She couldn’t answer that so she told me to just get on the plane and find an empty seat.  The head flight attendant asked for my boarding pass and I went through the whole story.  Her initial response was “They can’t do that!”.  She headed up the jetway to kick some @ss, when the gate agent came down and asked her to let me on.  She looked at the itinerary and told me to go take that First Class seat that I was confirmed for but not confirmed for.

I was on a flight I wasn’t supposed to be on, but that would get me to Baltimore 2 hours early…. would my bag meet me there?  Indeed it did.  The service agent who started everything off checked my bag on the first flight out of Huntsville in order to meet the flight that I came into Baltimore on, but did not put one of the green “STANDBY” tags on it — so yes my bag was on the plane with me.

A few very nice people from Delta seriously made my day; I was home by 11pm.  Major thanks to them.

(I wish you could have heard the whole plane bust out laughing when the safety video got to “in the unlikely event of a water landing…”)

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