More Airline Fun: the Impressive Price for Checking In Just a Bit Too Slowly

As part of my summer travels, I moved from my
sister's place in Washington State to my folks' place in Ohio this week.
As the last time I
traveled to The States, the flight schedule involved some unpleasant
experiences, but unlike last time where the memorable highlight was an anonymous hero, this
time the memorable highlight is a check-in agent
with a black heart.

(This is one of those “too long for anyone to read” story
that I'm writing mostly for my own memory, and as a bit of a cathartic measure, because it was a quite frustrating
experience, to say the least.)

The schedule was for Anthony and me to travel out of the tiny regional
airport in Bellingham, Washington on a
puddle-jumper to Seattle (25 minutes), then to Atlanta and finally
to Akron Ohio. Door to door would be 12 hours.

The puddle-jumper out of Bellingham was scheduled for 7am, so we arrived
at the airport at about 6:20 for what I expected
to be a leisurely few steps to the gate (the
airport has only four “gates”, doors that open up to the tarmac
for the walk to the plane, each accompanied by a
barrel of umbrellas for use in inclement weather).

My whole itinerary was ticketed as being on Delta Airlines, but it took
a bit to figure out that this puddle-jumper
flight was run by Horizon Air (which actually appears in this airport as
Alaska Airlines), so it took a few minutes for me
to find the correct check-in counter. When I did,
I met “Tanya”.

Tanya quickly made three facts clear:

The official cut-off time for baggage check was 6:20 (it was now 6:25), so she didn't have to check us in if we had bags (which we did; Anthony and I each had one).

She could check us in if she felt like it.

She was not going to check us in on this flight.

It was surreal because the area was almost empty, with two TSA agents
just hanging around waiting to inspect luggage before what must be the
shortest conveyor-belt ride in America. Tanya didn't give any reason for
her denial other than that the cut-off time allowed her to deny us. If they were short-handed in back, or if they were
running late for some other unknown task, or if there was some other kind
of practical reason, she never mentioned it.

Of course I apologized for not having paid attention to the
Alaska-Airlines Bellingham checked-bag cut-off policy, and begged her to
reconsider, since I had multiple connections to
meet and a 10-year-old child in tow, but she
quickly went from “let me see the bags and decide” to a
“nah, not gunna do it” attitude (seemingly making the decision
without regard to the bags, so I don't know why
she asked to see them).

A minute or two after we arrived at Tanya's station, a mother and child also showed up and was told the same
thing. The mother mentioned that they had gotten
caught in an hour-long wait at the border (apparently having come from
Canada), to which Tanya made an animated and incredibly smug
“that's not an excuse” involving a
sweeping “talk to the hand” motion with both hands.

They were trying to get to Disney World, so they presumably had other
connections and hotels and such also on the line. Not
only did Tanya not seem to care, she actually seemed to enjoy the
situation. Maybe she enjoyed the rush of power in deciding others' fate, or
maybe it was simple Shadenfreude. I suspect the former.

The father eventually joined the mother and child and learned of the
situation, and made some attempts to plead, but it was clear Tanya was not
in a charitable mood. To the
credit of all us customers, no one but Tanya ever raised their voice
or said anything in anger, despite what was clearly a
highly unreasonable situation.

As Tanya made preparations to leave the check-in counter to head to the
gate, the words “I'm sorry” somehow came from her mouth, but it
seemed clear to me that she wasn't the least bit sorry or sympathetic so
I took the opportunity to say (calmly,
softly):

“It sure doesn't feel like you're sorry. In fact, you seem to
be delighted to do this to us.”

That was the key word for Tanya... “delighted”.

She stormed off leaving us and the other family wondering what to do,
and moments later the only other two customers in the area (talking to
a different Alaska Airlines check-in agent) came
over to me and said “I'm so glad you said that. We were two minutes late. I
wanted to say something, but couldn't.”

They were two minutes past the allowed-to-deny-you time, and Tanya
wouldn't check them in. Wow. Just wow.

Again, to everyone's credit, no one said the choice emotional words of
anger toward Tanya that I'm sure we were all feeling... at this point, it
was still more jaw-dropping disbelief and wonder than anger.

I felt particularly bad for the Disney World family, because they left
plenty early enough that they should have had no problem — no one
expects an hour delay at the Canadian border at 5am — and now they
were stuck in limbo. My situation was much more
my own fault, and much easier to handle at the moment since I could just call up my sister to return to pick us up.
I had Anthony wait at curb for her as I tried to figure out what to do.

It was as that point that one of the TSA agents came over and said
“I want to compliment you for how you
handled that, keeping your cool in front of your boy”. I thanked her for her kind words, but since I certainly didn't feel cool on the inside, I didn't know that I deserved
them. She said that I
showed great restraint.

“Does Tanya often elicit the need to show this kind of restraint?”

“Not usually.”

The other check-in agent, Thomas, was left to handle Tanya's discards. He was soft-spoken and kind. He rebooked us on
the exact same itinerary for the next day, took the $200 ticket-change fee,
and said “see you tomorrow”.

What upset me the most in all this was not the fee nor the disruption in
schedule, but the way that Tanya handled the situation. Even if the end
result would have been exactly the same, a little
bit of compassion and empathy in her words and tone would have made a
world of difference, but Tanya displayed not the slightest hint of
either. I'm deeply upset by what she did, yet at
the same time I have pity for her and what kind
of life she must have had to have brought her to this.

Anyway, on a whim, later that afternoon at my sister's house, I called Delta Airlines to confirm the schedule for the
next day, only to find that they had no record of any of this; they said
that the ticket hadn't been changed since May. An hour
and $625 more in fees later, Anthony and I
had a confirmed schedule.

Neither Delta nor I have any idea what the $200 I'd paid was for, nor
what happened to the itinerary that had been created.

The TSA agent who had so kindly complimented me had suggested that you
can avoid the check-in line by doing the check-in online, then bringing the
printed barcode and luggage directly to a window
set aside just for that, so I went to the Delta
site to check in, but they handed me off to the Alaska Airlines site
because the day's travel was to being with them. There I
found out that I couldn't check in online
because, for whatever reason, my name was marked with a
special request as “deaf / hard of hearing”. This was
a surprise.

There's likely a completely innocent reason for this... even perhaps my
own mistake when I created the reservation... but
part of me wonders whether it's Tanya's idea of a “joke”.

I called Alaska Airlines to tell them that I
didn't need the special request, and to ask about the $200 and the
disappearing reschedule, but the lady I talked to
had no idea, and in what seems to be a recurring
theme for the day, I missed their Customer
Service hours by 10 minutes.

We arrived to the airport much earlier the next morning and saw that
Tanya was there, so I was thrilled when lucky
timing placed us in front of Thomas. We did have
to hand Tanya our tickets when walking out to the plane, but I had Anthony do it so that I
didn't have to even look at her. We passed
with the same cheery “Have a nice
day” that everyone got.

The Delta flight from Seattle to Atlanta had some stress because our
short connection time in Atlanta was made shorter by the flight running
increasingly late, and we were in the 2nd-to-the-last row (which meant that
it would take forever to exit the plane). The
flight crew was kind and sympathetic, but there was nothing they
could do. At least I
could use the on-board Wi-Fi (a first for
me) to keep up to date with the flight status, but things didn't bode well
when an hour out, our projected delay grew so big that the Delta iPhone app
said that we wouldn't make our 5:15pm connection and started offering
alternatives (all of which left the next morning). Yikes.

A kind lady closer to the front of the plane was traveling with
daughters seated right behind us in the last row, and since they had no
connection, I gently asked whether she'd swap
positions with me and Anthony so we'd have a
better chance to get out early. I felt
horrible putting her on the spot, but she immediately said
“oh, of course”, and so joined her daughters in the back of the
plane. The kindness of strangers can do wonders.
Thank you kind lady.

Atlanta is a big hub for Delta, so many people
had connections, and most seemed tight. We were
to park at gate A1, and leave from F4. They're not the two
most-separated gates in the airport, but very close; to walk between them
is over two kilometers(!), but there's also a
train for most of it.

We landed 14 minutes late, and on the way to the gate we promptly
stopped and sat on the tarmac for a while before
the pilot announced that someone was in our parking spot (another Delta
flight with mechanical trouble), so it would be a
few minutes while they looked for a
spot.

I had the tightest connection of anyone I
talked to, but the family across the aisle had a 5:30 flight to
Zurich (it was now 5:00) leaving from the same far-flung terminal I had to go to. I didn't
think any of us would make it.

Anthony and I ran like the wind.

Finally reaching the train out of breath and covered in sweat, we waited
for the train next to a pilot of some sort. I jokingly asked whether he was flying on Delta to
Akron (he wasn't), but he advised me that the train was the best way to get
to the gate, and wished me luck.

The train had to make six excruciatingly-slow stops before getting to
Terminal F, but along the way the pilot comes up to me and, looking at his
iPhone, tells me my flight is delayed to 7pm. That eased the pressure a bit, but just in case we still sprinted to the gate.
We arrived almost exactly at 5:15, so if it had
not been delayed, we would have missed it.

It ended up being delayed until 7:30 because the flight crew was late
arriving from some other flight. It took a while
before the Delta Airlines iPhone app was updated to show the delay, so
I bet the pilot was running a
private corporate app. He said that they
don't announce a delay until they're really
really really sure it's going to be delayed, because once passengers
see the delay they scatter throughout the airport and can't be recalled if
needed. Still, Delta knew the crew wouldn't even arrive to the airport (on
a flight from Mexico) until almost 7pm, so they
certainly could have let us know many hours earlier. That would have saved
a lot of stress. Maybe they were holding out hope
that another crew could be found. I dunno.

My folks picked us up after arriving 2½ hours late, and we
finally reached home at about 10:30. Thrillingly, it was actually with our
luggage (it's been long delayed on a few recent
trips).

I slept well the first night, but thoughts of Tanya and her
“delightful” lack of empathy kept me awake last night. I just tried to call Alaska Airlines customer service,
but they're not open on the weekend, so I'll give them a
try on Monday to let them know about my experience, and to figure
out the deal with the $200 I paid.

I've flown at least 250,000 miles over the years (including almost a
hundred transpacific round trips) and have on occasion called the airline
to offer words of praise for specific employees, but this will be the first
time in all these years to complain about a specific employee. It doesn't
feel good.