I think it's pretty safe to say that we've found the bottom.
Given that we were escorting somebody else to JFK, the original booking was on a JFK to National flight. Just as we were about to leave Manhattan an e-mail arrived from Delta informing me that our flight was cancelled due to bad weather (heavy-ish rain...). As a bonus, Delta had automatically re-booked us on a new routing, changing planes in Atlanta; turning a 200 mile journey into a 1300 mile trek.
Within the next thirty minutes, the $5 a month I pay to access Expert Flyer repaid itself ten times over. After some wrangling with the Delta call centre, I eventually managed to speak with a human being and, following some discussion, convinced them that I should be able to re-book onto an alternative flight from LaGuardia.
Delta uses the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, a listed structure quite seperate from the main terminal complex. Actually, that's not strictly true, Delta use a loosely bolted together steel shack that stands next to the Marine Air Terminal. After another arguement around whether or not we had paid for checked bags in advance, we managed to check-in and headed through security with no wait. Once in the departure area it was apparent that things were going very wrong. Flights were being boarded with the caveat that, "in complaince with federal law", the aircraft may return to the terminal if it hadn't taken-off within three hours.
A heavily delayed flight to National was boarding and the announcer suggested that anybody booked on later flights to Washington (i.e., us) should board this aircraft as they had no idea when any later flights would actually depart. Due to the rain, obviously.
Unfortunatley, while they could accomoate us on an earlier flight, Delta were unable to say what might happen to our luggage. As we were heading back to Europe from Washington less than 24 hours after arriving, we opted to remain at LaGuardia and take our chances on the same flight as a our cases.
As it happens, our flight started boarding around the time it was scheduled to depart, pulled back then taxied directly to the runway, past a large line of aircraft including, I beleive, the earlier flight that Delta were trying to coax everybody onto.
Boarding was something of an eye-opener. As all of the paying passengers lined up at the gate, a group of, uniformed, Delta crew walked past and boarded before us. Note that there is no pre-assigned seating on the Shuttle. While I think it's dissappoiting behaviour, I can't claim to have been at all surprised to find that all of the exit row seats were filled with Delta uniforms. What did shock me a little was that the uniformed staff were sharing a bucket of fried chicken, stinking out the aircraft as customers boarded. Only in America.
When we were there, New York was plastered in billboards promoting Delta's WiFi service. Perhaps the airline should focus on getting the operational basics close to correct before they start adding more bells and whistles? Just a thought.
In a similar vein, can I also suggest that the standards set by the (actually pretty good) Delta Assist Twitter servce be applied to the rest of the company's customer communications? Most of the world does not use Twitter, regardless of anything airline executives may have read in a magazine. I was finding it impossible to extract a refund from Delta for the lounge access fee I had pre-paid (with there being no lounge at LaGuardia). Days of phone calls had ended in stalemate - an exasperating circualr debate about things that needed done online and then via telephone; loosely translated, Delta's position was "please piss off, we really can't be bothered dealing with you". I happened to tweet an off-hand remark about the situation, without specifically tagging @deltaAssist and was astounded have them resolve the problem with a minimum of hassle. Proof that even the most disfuntional of organisations have some good people.
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