This weekend my sister and I flew to Denver for a concert. Everything went great, until the flight home. Our flight was an 8 am departure so we arrived around 6. We boarded as usual, all good. Sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes and were told that there was a mechanical issue and we'd need to deplane, the repair would take 1-2 hours. Most passengers had tight connections so we were told to line up and talk to gate agents about rebooking. Roughly half the passengers got in line. For the next 3 hours we had 2 gate agents to help over a hundred passengers. Their website wouldn't help us, the chat wouldn't help us, the phone wait time was over an hour. Mind you, the gate agents weren't given printer paper to print tickets so they had to literally run to other gates for each new ticket to print them. Their computers would randomly crash and delete all their progress so they were constantly switching from phones, to iPhones, to each others computers. It was a MESS!
When it got to be our turn to rebook, we were given a 2:30 connection, great!
Another hours of delay after this (yes, we are 4 hours into our 1-2 hour delay) we still hadn't received any follow up information, no updates, no emails. Nothing. We were all stuck at the gate because we didn't know when it would be time to leave.
Oh but don't worry, they sent us a 12$ meal voucher, that may or may not work at food establishments around the airport. Yay!
At 12:30, when we'd realized we'd be missing our new connection once again we got back in line to rebook once more. 30 minutes later of waiting, the co pilot comes out and announces they have no information, just keep waiting, and leaves. Wow, okay thank you sir!
Another 20 minutes, there's finally only 4 people ahead of us to book, yay!
The pilot comes out, we're boarding now! Everyone get on.
So finally another gate agent appears. Where were you when these guys could've desperately used your help? Some people asked her, she was so aggressively rude and made it OUR fault. She wouldn't help, answer questions or assist any of the gate agents.
Most of us had now missed our rebooked connections and had NO way of rebooking. Again, no website help, no chat bot help, no phone help. Now we couldn't talk to the agents either because we had to board right then.
When it was our turn to board I asked what we should do ar our next airport so we could get home. "Go on the website on your flight, they will give you WiFi".
When we boarded I asked the flight attendant if this would be possible. No, it wasn't possible. Talk to the gate agent after your flight. So currently, we have no way home. Ok.
We are all seated now, waiting to fly out. We sit on the tarmac for another 30 minutes before we FINALLY leave.
While in air, there's an announcement "for all the delays today all passengers above 21 will receive 1 free cocktail! This is all our company will be providing. We will come by shortly". What a weird thing to say after 6 hours of delays? Instead of making it a nice, hey we're sorry. It's yet another screw you.
We land, deplane. Go to the gate agent for help rebooking. She can't help us. She tells us we'd need to fully leave the airport, come back and rebook a new ticket. Uh, what? Ok, since we had a connection previously, can you tell us where to find our bags? No, that's not her job.....
Wow. So we go to baggage claim because, I'm not sure where to start but this seems like a good bet.
Our bags never arrive. 30 minutes after waiting I go to Alaska baggage. At this point my sister is ready to burn them down and I'm trying really hard to keep my cool.
I tell her with tears brimming that we have no way home, no bags, and we just need someone to please help us and tell us how we can get home.
She is the one and ONLY employee who actually sees us and takes it upon herself to help. How odd a bag agent can rebook our flight in 3 minutes but we're not 9 hours into our day and no one else could? She was so nice, helpful, understanding. She put in a request for our bags, but couldn't tell us if they'd even made it to the city (they had unloaded all baggage when the repairs were happening because a lot of people just booked new flights).
She said to wait 30 minutes for them to find our bags but we couldn't leave the carousel because they'd be coming from there. Also, we had just over 1 hour to get back through tsa before we missed our new flight. While waiting, we pull up our new itinerary and we get an error code. We had no flight home still. The link didn't work. The confirmation code only showed our previous flight that day.
An hour goes back, she'd gone on lunch, still no bag. We go back up. The new lady once again, didn't want to help us. She told us to just go sit back down and wait. I'm sorry, are you kidding? Thankfully, our original lady had just come back right then from lunch by some damn miracle. She helped us again, got our tickets. Still didn't know where our bags were but assured us she'd get them home with us read more