A Blog For All - Comments - Keep it civil
I was to leave for Oakland CA, last thursday evening out of Fort Lauderdale. The trip was to see my brothers first house in San Francisco. My mother, my little sister my new husband and I were to all meet at the airport. My husband is a smart traveler. Like many of the news reports explain to call ahead and confirm flight times, we called. We were confronted with an automated message. The message mentioned that because of the northeast storms, they could not take any more calls because of the call volume. They then prompt to tell you to check the jetblue.com website for updated flight status.
We checked the website, and sure enough the flight was delayed by an hour. Since we live 45 min from the airport, and our flight was supposed to take off just after rush hour. We decided to wait until rush hour cools down before we leave. Why get stuck in rush hour just to wait around for a possibly cancelled flight.
We checked the website again a half of an hour later. It was delayed again one hour. So with almost three hours on our hands, we decided to have a healthy dinner, rather then the stuff at the airport. When we checked the website after dinner, it said that the flight would be leaving in an hour which was an hour less then the delay previously. So we rushed down to the Airport.
My mom called us as we were approaching the terminal, "We are already in our seats, they are getting ready to leave where are you!"
Long story short... we missed the plane!
The represenatives at the ticket counter claimed they were going to hold the plane. After giving up our bags under "voluntary seperation" (meaning our bags wouldnt be on the same flight with us) rushing through security (30 mins) and running to the gate, the plane was gone!
This trip meant alot to me. Something you cannot put a price on. It was supposed to be the first vacation my husband and I were to go on, only a year after our wedding, and no honeymoon to speak of! :-(
Quite honestly it is not the airlines fault that we had bad weather last week. They could have reacted quicker when the planes were stuck on the runway and maybe thought about it being vacation week for the Northeast and rebook those folks on different airlines. But it is not their fault that we had snow- I would still fly them if they came to my city, and I think they have learned a valuable lesson.
My kids fly JetBlue all the time to see their dad. One JetBlue pilot gave his cell phone to my daughter to call me when she was sad. One JetBlue flight crew wrote me a thank you note to tell me how nice it was to have my kids on board. JetBlue mailed them JetBlue beanie babies and big JetBlue lego sets. The crew always treats them like they are thrilled to see them and they board them last so that they dont have to be in their seats long before the doors close and they take off. I love JetBlue and will never fly any other airlines if there is a JetBlue flight available. Every airline has troubles once in a while.
In 1987 whent the stock market crashed, many customers couldnt reach the new, inexpensive stock broker Charles Schwab & Co. Many people took the opportunity to say they would never trade their again. But, Schwab learned so many lessons and overinvested in backup systems so that it would never happen again. They built so much capacity and redundancy in the systems that the 1989 earthquake that took a huge toll on SF didnt phase Schwab cstomers at all.
United, American and others have had plenty of mistakes and didnt learn from them. Just by their response, we can tell that JetBlue has learned from watching others. Just watch, JetBlue will be better for this mistake and all passengers in the future will benefit.
JetBlue? The same airline that had a passenger remove a t-shirt because it said, in Arabic, we will not be silenced (a comment on the ferocious destruction of Lebanon in the Summer on ’06)? Screw them - I hope they go out of business.
Granted, Jet Blue can't control the weather. But they sure as hell can control how long they are going to imprison their passengers in a aluminum tube!
To keep passengers in their seats for up to 10 hours borders on criminal abuse. I am surprised they didn't have riots on their hands in those planes. I for won would have demanded to be let off after about 2 hours and I would have made a big fuss if they refused to do so.
I think there needs to be some legislation passed that requires all airlines to compensate passengers for each hour (after the first) that they are confined in the plane while it sits on the tarmac. And the compensation should steeply increase with each hour, e.g., $100 for the second hour, $200 for the third, etc.
By this formula a ten hour confinement would require a payment of $4500 per passenger. Extreme you say? Yes, but if that compensation scheme were in place the airlines wouldn't even consider confining people more than an hour or two.
Today there is little cost to airlines so they have little incentive to care about the passenger's comfort, except for their reputation and competition from other carriers. But look, despite what JetBlue has done most people say they would still fly them! So where's the competition?
While jetBlue is taking all kinds of flack, not so much flack is headed towards the state government in Harrisburg, PA, which closed a stretch of one of its interstate highways for over 24 hours because of the ice and snow condition and it took upwards of 24 hours to retrieve people from their cars and trucks?
Or New York City that issued tickets to thousands of cars because they were plowed in and the plunging temperatures made it impossible to dig out as everything froze into bulletproof ice (though Bloomberg later called on the NYPD and Dept of Finance to cancel those tickets)?
No compensation there at all. Nothing to suggest that the states will compensate people for the inconveniences they incurred as a result of the closures.
It's real easy for the government to pass laws demanding others pay for errors and such, but what happens when it is the government itself that engages in that kind of behavior. Ignore the problem and hope that it doesn't happen again.
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