She s says, Oh and moves on to the next customer. As they are boarding the plane the attendants ask

I m mad as hell and there aint nothing I can do about it! Or is there After contemplating several ways to satisfy my anger I ve decided the best recourse I have is to share my story far and wide like an old biddy at a quilting bee.
This morning I left my house, baby and suitcase in tow, and headed cruise deals on mariner of the seas for the airport. As my husband and I entered cruise deals on mariner of the seas the ticketing area of the airport we noticed the ticketing line was extremely long though it appeared to be moving quickly. cruise deals on mariner of the seas The line seemed to be full of beer-bellied, baseball-capped, 40 something men. Suddenly I remembered my neighbor saying something about Nascar weekend a few days ago. No worries, I thought to myself, cruise deals on mariner of the seas I ve got my seat assignment and I m over an hour early for my flight so I should be fine.
We walk up to the end of the check-in line to wait our turn and the line does move rather quickly. After the attendant checks my bags and hands me back my ticket the she says, Just go up to the gate counter and get your seat assignment. Don t worry. I m sure you ll get on the flight.
Hmmm, I think to myself. Why would I be worried? I bought my ticket from an on-line travel website weeks ago. The airline was America West and I was assigned a seat at the time I purchased it. I had decided to make the trip up to Washington so that I could spend some time with my extremely ill father and to let him get to know my baby a little bit more.
As we reach the security check point my husband kisses my daughter and me and we part ways. After getting through the mammoth security lines I head over to the gate counter. I say to the lady at the gate, Hi, I was told that I needed to get a seat assignment at the gate.
She s says, Oh and moves on to the next customer. As they are boarding the plane the attendants ask for volunteers to take a later flight that will land in Seattle at 2:30 am, after you spend several hours in the Las Vegas airport. That s going to be fun with a baby. Another perk they re willing to throw in is a $300 travel voucher so you can travel on their lovely airline at a later date. No thanks!
Eventually the plane is boarded cruise deals on mariner of the seas and the gate counter is surrounded by angry passengers. I call my husband to let him know to come and get me. As we talk he says, You better cruise deals on mariner of the seas make sure to get your bags.
The counter lady looks at me and says, Your bags are on the plane. You can get them in Seattle. Oh great, now my clothing, toiletries, and most importantly my baby s car seat are on their way to the Northwest.
At this point I ve lost it. I can tell all of the other passengers think I m a lunatic over by the wall crying my eyes out. Actually, I take that back. There were quite a few who came up and asked if I needed help. Some of them said, You make sure this airline takes care of you! Those passengers were actually very comforting.
Of course I ve already asked for the supervisor or anyone higher than the lady I m talking to. Wouldn t you know it she was the highest ranking person available at the time? Eventually I agree to take the travel voucher cruise deals on mariner of the seas and the ticket for the next day.
As she is filling out my paperwork I ask, If you guys knew you were so overbooked than why wouldn t you call me this morning to warn me about this? I would liked to have known this before I made the 45 minute drive, checked my luggage, and stood in hellacious security lines.
After this woman finds out that I m going to visit with my ailing cruise deals on mariner of the seas father she does become softer towards me and I start to calm down. To their credit America West did eventually manage to come up with a car seat for my daughter.
Honestly, I would hate to have their job and I know I could have handled this in a more Christ-like way. I just felt powerless in the situation and frankly, ripped off too. Sometimes those feelings bring out the jackass in me.
Man, reading about that just makes my blood boil. My wife and I just flew AmWest about 2 weeks ago. Our experience was just fine, thankfully. It *was* a flight that had been oversold, cruise deals on mariner of the seas but we checked in on-line about 12 hours before. We were able to print our own boarding passes at home, and they had seat numbers on them. So, I m wondering if you checked in on line. If you didn t, I wonder if doing so would have changed the experience for you.
I feel your pain! I flew to Austin, Texas last week and the flight home, while not full, had a few seats that were double booked. In fact, my seat was double booked. I felt bad for the woman wanting her seat, but I was extremely tired and gladly showed her it was my seat too! :-)
About three years ago I had some critical parts I needed shipped to my manufacturing area. Instead of sending these parts to my location in Chandler, Arizona, they shipped the parts to some beach resort town in Mexico. When I called cruise deals on mariner of the seas AWA to discuss the situation, I asked them why my flights to dull and boring are never routed to warm and exciting. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and an apology for my missing parts.
To answer your question (#4), yes, I believe you can do it even if you re checking luggage. You still have to wait in line to check it, or you check it curbside w/ the Skycap. But, you ve got your boarding pass so no worries.
AWA is not the worst large airline in North America. I m sure that honor belongs to Air Canada, home of the, We don t care if the earlier flight is empty. You can t get on it. Screw you! And the, Well we ve rebooted the plane twice and can t get it to operate. We d return to the gate now, but there are other planes there, so we re just going to sit here for two hours while the other plans take off. Yes that means that you ll miss the other two flights to your destination.
Here s what you need to do. Write a letter to the CEO and the VP of customer service. Tell them what happened and tell them your frequent flyer number. Ask what you should have done differently. Put in all the details that made this frustrating. If you do this right they ll either send you a huge voucher or 50,000 frequent flyer miles.
Worst experience I ever had was with United. Late flights, rude flight attendents who refused to help me (I was 34 weeks pregnant) or even tell me where in O Hare my connecting flight was (which I almost missed due to the first flight being late).
Ok courtney turned me on to the site/blog. I was surfing around checking things out. Got a kick out of the AWA story. As I m sitting here there is a story on the news that a person was awarded $3,100 for missing their flight becaused it was over booked It didn t look like AWA.
WOW. Thanks for the reply. I was just checking out a person in my neighborhood s chat room blog thing. I just thought it was funny that at the same time I was reading their story about being mad at the airlines, a story was running on the news about the exact same thing. I was not endorsing litigation. Good thing we got that straight I wouldn t want to start a suing frenzy on newcoolthang.
All (except for a select few) airlines overbook flights, it sucks in a way, but it s the way they keep their planes full. To avoid this in the future you need to call the airline directly long before your flight leaves and make sure you have an actual cruise deals on mariner of the seas seat assignment. Of course seat assignments are NOT guaranteed and it could still change. Check in early, all to many people show up with the minimum time for check in and they get screwed. It s their own fault.
If you end up not getting a seat the airline is required to compensate you, either with a voucher for future travel or by refunding the remaining portion cruise deals on mariner of the seas of your ticket (minus taxes). If you take a refund they are not required to do anything else with you .you then need to find your own way to where you are going. I ve hardly ever seen anyone take a refund because then you are on your own. If you take a voucher then the airline will put you on another flight, give you a hotel voucher if necessary and meal voucher.
Nice comment overall Joe A., but I disagree with this idea that it is the passenger s fault when they buy a ticket with a confirmed seat assignment, show up two hours early at the airport, suffer through security and check in lines, and then get to the gate only to discover the airline has sold their confirmed seat to someone else. These weasely airlines need clamp down hard on their resale channels (or the resellers cruise deals on mariner of the seas need to clamp down hard on the airlines) and ensure that a confirmed sale and seat assignment on the Internet is actually confirmed. If the seat is not going to be there when the guest shows up then there needs to be instructions warning that the seat is not truly confirmed until the boarding pass is in hand .
Airlines may do this a lot but it is a scummy practice. (The everybody does it excuse their employees gave us is pathetic and insulting, btw. And it is the standard excuse for any discretion one gets caught in everybody commits adultery, everybody cruise deals on mariner of the seas cheats on their taxes, everybody steals cruise deals on mariner of the seas for the office . No, not every body does; and I find it hard to believe that every airline engages in this specific practice either). They won t be in business long with such shameful treatment cruise deals on mariner of the seas of their customers. But then again, I won t be surprised if US Air/ America cruise deals on mariner of the seas West (Worst) Airlines is out of business in a few years anyway. cruise deals on mariner of the seas Based on our experience, the writing is already on the wall.
One thing to make clear is that when airlines overbook their flights, they are not intentionally trying to make someone get stuck at the airport. They have yield management programs that calculate the show factor for a particular flight and authorize the bookings accordingly. Of course no computer cruise deals on mariner of the seas program is perfect and sometimes it authorizes too high, or by chance the figured percentage doesn t happen for a particular flight. Then you have 165 people booked on a flight that only holds 150 say, and you ve got a mess on your hands. When I worked for the airlines it was one of the things I disliked cruise deals on mariner of the seas most, dealing with a severly overbooked flight. I never had any probl