Denied Boarding: A US Airways Tale

Tuesday, April 11 2006 @ 02:57 PM EDT Contributed by: Admin Views: 5,728 It's Las Vegas Airport. We're not allowed to board. We're about to enter a Twilight Zone. Rod Serling couldn't have thought this up. I'm sitting in the Passenger Assistance Center for America West Airlines. It's near gate B17. It's also in the Twilight Zone. Last evening, America West bumped my son and I from a flight to Pittsburgh which would have taken us to Indy where we live. This flight wasn't my first choice. It was a red-eye, but was our only choice as spring break and convention travelers literally chewed up every available seat, many weeks in advance. Even these tickets were expensive, not the usual reasonable cost to Las Vegas. We arrived by Continental, and were to depart via a US Airways 'code-share' flight on America West. They overbooked it. Indeed there were at minimum 18 people bumped, and perhaps as many as 30 (by my head count). We were but a few of the many that weekend whose travel plans were put into a tailspin. The gate agent, likely already scarred by other overbooked flights and the hostilities that emerge, was unfortunately both inept, and a liar. She claimed to have examined all of our flights and was going to have us rebooked on a Southwest Airlines flight. Her untruth was revealed when many of us told her that we had other final destinations than Pittsburgh, the original destination of this ill-fated flight (they had to return to the gate to change planes, the lucky ones, when the aircraft was deemed unflyable and returned later to another gate). One upset passenger went over the top, and shortly a requested supervisor and four of Las Vega's Finest appeared to prevent an outbreak of violence. There was also other bad news. We saw many occurances of a supervisor, repleat with Las Vegas Metro Police in tow, ready for more over-the-top people. My son and I were, a day and a half later, lucky to get out of Las Vegas. This is written on April the 8th and 9th, a super-busy Spring Break weekend that also signals the start of the week before Easter holidays. If one is overbooked, there simply are no flights through the entire weekend. Any fight one gets is garnered by being put on sequential flight standby lists until one of them has spare seats. This creates a rolling log jam. Spare seats are made impossible because each new flight is also overbooked, and the priority list of who gets on into the spare seats (made from no-shows) is very oddly made up. It's a snowball effect. The people here in the PAC are justifiably angry. They were sold tickets under deceptive circumstances: the deception was that as one gate agent quoted, it's typical to oversell 30% of the seats on flights during this zone and others. It's fraudulent and deceptive to do this, but her rationale was that "all the airlines do it". I don't believe as many as American West's totals so far are typically oversold this way. It's legal, and it shouldn't be. You get choices when you're denied boarding at America West. There are three: get cash (check) compensation immediately, get a roundtrip ticket (free) to any of their destinations in the 48 contiguous United States. Or, you can sue if you eschew either option. The carrier is supposed to feed you, get you to a hotel (if it's overnight) and get you confirmed on the next available flight. It's all annotated in a little booklet they give you. But as there were three conventions and spring break travelers in Las Vegas, there were no hotels that would take America West's paltry $49/night travel vouchers. So, we were essentially forced to camp in a pit of slot machines and benches that have arms that prevent laying down: Las Vegas International Airport. We tried going standby on many flights. All of them were overbooked. We got to know many other travelers trying to get anywhere close to Indy that they could. Eventually, we flew on a red-eye on Delta to Cincinnati's CVG airport, rented a car, and drove back to Indianapolis, two days late. During this experience, we discovered some interesting things. The first is that as one US Airways gate agent explained, America West and US Airways are married, but not living together. America West's computers can't book US Airways flights, but the reverse can be true. Indeed the America West gate agents were uniformly disabled by their computer system. Only a valiant agent, working well past the end of her shift, was able to find the ugly flight schedule that got us back to Indy. We praise her. Not all were like her. Indeed the people in the PAC lost a perfectly good flight back to Indy because of their ineptness. They handed us off to each other, requiring a new learning curve for each, infinitely expanding customer service time, as lines grew, and patience shrank among the disgruntled passengers. The disconnect between America West and US Airways is onerous. So is the fact that the customer service at America West is so blithely (with a few exceptions) poor. Along the way, I was trying to become a status flyer at US Airways. Now I feel like an orphan again. First, Northwest caused me endless grief. Then I tried to be loyal to United. They tanked. US Airways tanked but looked like a winner until the past few flights-- and now this one-- have been screwed up. Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and go with over-priced American. Maybe consistent quality can be found there. How awful that the government allows the fraud of overbooking and denied boarding without more stringent penalties. How many of us need to have our lives upended by these policies before someone can do something about this? Must it always be the case that corporations can bribe their way into comfy legislation that protects their most boorish practices? It's all so sad.

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