Delta, Delta, Go-to-hell-ta

If you're planning to travel by air this summer, don't. The congestion in the skies is horrible. When I landed at JFK airport from Europe, I had a leisurely three hours to catch my connecting flight to Dallas. Then the Dallas flight got booted from a 4:30 departure to a 6:30 one, or thereabouts. We boarded the plane at seven. At some point hours later, we pushed back from the gate, and joined the excruciatingly slow line to take off. We were all very thirsty, so Delta served us a bit of water, and peanuts, and I got a warm diet Coke out of a flight attendant. We were all getting really anxious about this delay; the pilots weren't giving us routine updates. But then, as we inched forward, the pilot told us that we'd been idling so long we no longer had enough fuel for the trip to Dallas, and besides, the flight crew had been working so long that they would exceed the maximum allowed under federal law if the plane took off.

Flight cancelled. It took us an hour to creep back to the gate. We had sat on that plane for FIVE HOURS. It was midnight. And the fun was just beginning.

When we passengers came back into Terminal 3, Delta was supposed to help us get rebooked. Thus began a comedy of errors. Nobody had clear information. One Dallas passenger I talked to had waited forever on the phone to talk to a Delta representative, and was told at long last that she couldn't help him, that he had to deal directly with someone at the counter there at JFK. When he finally got to the counter at JFK, he was told that no, he could only arrange his next flight on the phone. Throughout the evening, I interviewed numerous passengers who kept getting conflicting information from Delta representatives.

Moreover, Delta adamantly insisted it had no responsibility to get us hotel rooms for the night. The airline blamed the FAA for the long delay, absolving itself of responsibility. As one passenger told me, "If Delta knew that there was a reasonable chance that the plane wouldn't be able to take off because it's crew had worked too long, and they left the gate anyway, then Delta bears some responsibility." It didn't matter -- the Delta staff told us all we were on our own to find a hotel in New York City after midnight. One couple I'd been talking too bit the financial bullet and sprang for a $45 cab ride (plus tip) into Manhattan, and a $289 room in Times Square. Another couple scored a room at a nearby hotel, but had to walk all alone, scared, across a dark parking lot at 2 a.m. to catch a shuttle to the hotel. I decided that I would sleep on the floor, once I got rebooked.

Lucky for me, the airline automatically rebooked me, because I'd checked in so very early (in Istanbul, when it was still Saturday night in NYC). I was on the earliest available flight back to Dallas. It was to leave at, get this, 7 pm on Monday night. So I would have to spend all night and virtually all day in that airport -- and I was one of the lucky ones. Some people wouldn't be able to get out for two days.

I have been a loyal Delta customer and SkyMiles member for, I dunno, 20 years or so, but this incident severed that connection. The Delta staff we dealt with that night were almost uniformly rude and contemptuous. Granted, they were dealing with upset passengers (and I saw one incident of passenger rudeness that made me pity the airline personnel), but the fact is, people were being told that they would either have to spend hundreds of dollars and find their own hotel rooms at midnight, or prepare to sleep on the floor. It wouldn't have hurt Delta's staffers to have shown some empathy with their customers. But over and over, the attitude we got was, "You people are ruining our evening." Several of us were begging the Delta people for water. Nothing was open at that hour in the airport, and we were thirsty and hungry. Finally a Delta person brought out some bottles of (warm) water and some snacks. Just dumped them in the floor and walked off. She also dumped some blankets there, and shuffled off.

We were advised that if we wanted to get food and drink, we needed to leave Terminal 3 and go over to Terminal 4, where there was an all-night Au Bon Pain. Several of us made the trek, and made plans to bed down for the night in that terminal. We had to leave the secure area to get over to Terminal 4, and when we finally arrived, we bedded down on metal grates over in a corner, and tried to sleep. I leave it to you to imagine how difficult that was to do.

The next morning, two of our number had left for parts unknown. D. and I, bleary-eyed and with backaches, decided to drag back over to Terminal 3, check in for our 7pm flight, and try to get some more sleep. When we approached the Delta drone at check-in, she informed us that the policy was to not allow people to check in until at least six hours before their flight.

"But we're not leaving till 7 tonight," I said. "Please, we've been sleeping all night on a metal grate in Terminal 4. We only want to be able to sleep on the carpet in Terminal 3. Can't you give us our boarding passes and let us go in?"

I'll never forget her response, dripping with sarcasm: "I am sad for you. But that's not my fault." Snap.

Later, recounting the snottiness of the Delta staff to another Delta staffer -- a young woman who was new to the job, and was kind -- the younger woman apologized, and said that she had noticed among the Delta staff at JFK that the older you were, the bitchier you were to customers. After she said that, I started noticing my interactions with Delta employees, and with a single exception -- a tall middle-aged gentleman (he truly was that) working in the Delta information pod near gate 16 -- all the younger employees we dealt with were polite, and all the ones over 30 acted like they were doing us a favor to bother to talk to us.

While we waited to board the plane home, several of us talked about what Delta had done wrong, from a customer relations point of view. We all agreed that the insane congestion at JFK was not Delta's fault. But Delta's handling of the affair was a fiasco. We listed the following basic errors:

1) Give information to passengers stuck on planes. Had the pilots given us regular updates about our progress -- even if they had nothing new to say -- they would have gone a long way toward easing passenger anxiety. Five hours is a long damn time to sit on a plane, and we were hearing from the cockpit far too rarely.

2) Serve people water, soda and juice. The flight attendants did do a quick water service as we sat there dehydrating, but they didn't serve anything else as the evening dragged on. Toward the end of the tarmac drama, I asked one flight attendant if he could at least serve us beverages now that we weren't talking off. He said, "No, the ice melted a long time ago."

3) Have a crisis plan in place when this happens. Had Delta had well-informed staff on hand at the airport, giving out reliable and consistent information, it would have been tremendously helpful. Had they done the decent thing and sprung for hotel rooms, same thing. Had they brought out food and drinks, even just cold water, it would have been a blessing. Had its staff shown the barest empathy instead of sullen resentment, it would have made a very difficult situation much easier to bear. It did none of those things. And lots of people were incandescently angry over it.

I know this isn't a problem unique to Delta, but I tell you, it's going to happen again and again and again this summer. We almost didn't get out of JFK on Monday night; our plane was two hours late in leaving, because of congestion. And one poor soul who got bumped off our Sunday flight was naive enough to believe Delta when it told him that he was "confirmed" for the 7pm flight on Monday; two of us implored him to disbelieve their promises, and to make them give him a boarding pass now! He was modest and shy, and thought that they couldn't screw him over again.

He was not on the flight. That young man had to bed down for a second night on the floor at JFK. At least he had some carpet.

I strongly believe that airlines should be forbidden from overbooking flights -- even if that means higher ticket prices for all of us. I strongly believe that airlines should be forced to have contingency plans in place for stranded passengers (food reserves, cots, blankets, pillows) -- even if that means higher ticket prices for all of us. And it's beyond obvious that the FAA needs to get its act together with the air traffic control system -- even if that means higher ticket prices for all of us.

As for Delta, I don't care what it does, frankly. I'm going to cash in my frequent flyer miles at the first available opportunity, and be done with them. To me, the face and voice of that "I am sad for you" woman -- who may have transferred to Delta from the Brooklyn post office -- is now and forever the face and voice of Delta Airlines.