“I just can’t stand the airline industry’s double standards, the blatant misrepresentations at best, and lies at worst”

Airline customer service is a joke. That’s the conclusion Scott Overland came to after a lengthy — and at times funny — back-and-forth with Delta Air Lines’ “customer care” department.

The e-mails, which he was kind enough to forward to me, suggest Delta doesn’t always read its customers’ e-mails.

The chain starts simply enough, with a request to extend credit on a canceled ticket. Overland had been promised he could use a ticket credit for up to a year, but Delta didn’t bother to tell him when the year started.

When I called Delta, I was told that the one year began on the date the ticket was issued, February 28th, not when it was canceled, in June. The agent who canceled the flight never told me this, and I was led to believe that she would at least have a year from the cancellation date, if not from the date of the flight.

This creative definition of year — and even day — is not uncommon in the airline industry.

Here’s the predictable cut-and-paste answer from Delta’s customer care department.

While we would like to offer special consideration in cases such as yours, we are unable to honor the many requests that we receive from others in similar situations. We follow a consistent policy to ensure that Delta is fair to everyone who travels with us. Accordingly, we must respectfully decline your request. I am truly sorry to disappoint you, as I am sure this is not the answer you expected.

Unknown to that department, Overland had already made contact with the airline at a higher level, and it had agreed to help him. Apparently, one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. Overland called Delta on it.

I am very sorry to receive a e-mail from you that is so blatantly false. I already received a phone call from your customer care department in Atlanta and they reissued a credit for the full $190.

Thus, at least one department of your airline does offer “special consideration,” and I truly appreciate them.

Nonetheless, I am incredibly offended by your e-mail that includes straight lies in it, and I intend to forward it to the heads of customer service for Delta, along with with travel media outlets.

In the future, I would suggest checking with you actual customer service department before sending false e-mails.

Overland makes a valid point. Based on the correspondence between him and Delta, it appears the customer service agents didn’t take the time to carefully review his request. If they had, they might have responded like its executive contacts — with a little compassion and understanding instead of an insincere form letter.

At least that’s how he sees it.

It just really angered me for other people who may not think to copy the head of customer service on an e-mail. The fact that he essentially lied to me in that e-mail, while the customer service folks in Atlanta were incredibly helpful, seemed like it should be made public.

While this situation worked out in my favor, I just can’t stand the airline industry double standards, the blatant misrepresentations at best, and lies at worst, that are in the e-mails.

This just illustrates the disarray in the airline industry.

I’m glad Delta was able to help Overland, but I share his disappointment in the subsequent form rejections. I think the airline can do better.

  • Lianne

    In my novice travel days I almost fell victim to this one. Considering you can by tickets several month out from a trip it seemed only logical to me that the credit expires either a year from either (a) the cancellation date or (b) the original date you intended to fly. I got luck and booked a ticket right before the credit expired.

    You know…I still don’t understand why we as consumers allow a company to take our money with only the barest promise of delivering the promised service. I understand that they likely have credits expire for accounting purposes, but come on. And as far as the customer service goes, I’m certain they are simply told to deny all requests as I’m sure most customers take the first “no” they receive.

  • Martin Smith

    As I have written before. What about when an airline takes over $3,000.00 of your money because you missed a short flight at the beginning of a transatlantic trip and won’t help you at all. This happened to me. I even wrote to Elliott about this. I would think this would be mroe interesting than the things you are publishing.

  • Amy

    Since it is in the airlines best interest to sell tickets as far in advance as possible, so they can set their schedules and have use of the money for as long as possible, it would seem that a little leeway on using the credit would be in order. I made reservations several months in advance only to have the airline change the schedule to a less convenient time. I took the full refund and chose another airline in part because the credit had so little time left that I was concerned about losing it. A few weeks later I did book another trip with this airline and would have used the credit had it been available but it was just long enough that it would have expired. My situation worked out well but we all went through some book keeping to move money around instead of running an airline and traveling.

  • Mort B

    I have recently had a quite similar experience to that of Scott Overland, also with Delta, which supports my belief that customer-care is care in name only, and that this airline needs to make some serious changes in the way it deals with users. In my instance, I wrote to customer-care explaining that I felt that my upgraded trip from HNL to MAD had been booked via LAX and ATL, rather than direct HNL to ATL, and requesting an exception to their rules to permit me to change without payment of a $250 change fee. Their response (received after 10 days of waiting) told me that when a flight schedule is changed, the seat reservation must be reconfirmed by phoning Delta. Duh!! I have resent the e-mails to Delta once again asking, and I am still waiting for a response after 5 days.

    FYI, I have also addressed a snail-mail letter to the CEO of Delta, to which I am still also awaiting a response.

  • William Rowell

    Kind of a curve to “When is a Day actually a Day” is the rental car companies. My companies contracted rental rates with a certain red colored rental car company are very good (as low as $19 USD on weekend in Canada for Mid-Sized cars). But as with all rental cars, if you go over 24 hours on, say, a $40 a day rental you pay $20 for the 25th hour, and by the 26th hour you’re just on the next day.

    The Trick to this, is that as a “Special” type of customer, they pre-print your contract and have it waiting in your vehicle. I have seen SOME, not many, pre-prints 60 minutes before my scheduled flight arrival.

    If my flight were delayed, or my baggage take extra time to be carousalled, you could be driving off the lot with a contract that is 2 hours old already (for sake of example the contract say 10:00, you’re leaving at Noon). Then, the next day you return the car 30 minutes before your 24 hours is up, 11:30, but unknown to you, you’re 90 minutes late by the contract, and paying for 2 days.

  • Carver

    @William

    I have had the exact same problem. I used to reserve my car early to ensure its ready when I arrive. Until I was hit with extra fees. However, the converse works. If you get in early, and your car is waiting, you get extra time.

    My experience is that my car is generally waiting 1-2 hours before the reservation time. So, If my flight arrives at 10am. I’ll reserve the car for 11am. That takes care of the problem of the car contract time being too early. You can of course have them reprint the contract but it does defeat the purpose of get in and go.

  • Mr Bad Example

    I have a colleague who is a stickler for details. His advice to me has been worth a great deal of money. It has to do with contracts and the BS Airlines and Rental Car companies attempt to put over on unsuspecting customers.

    “Don’t tell me what it means, Tell me what it says” I have used that exact line numerous times to get things credited or refunded. Having a good understanding of your airlines Contract of Carriage is money in the bank. Sometimes you can actually hear the person on the other end sigh when you say, “Please refer to paragraph 1-2 of page blah blah and take a look at it.” An informed, engaged and involved consumer is the ONLY way to get airlines to change. We as customers have to make it cheaper to be customer friendly and the way you do that is to hold them accountable EVERY TIME, NO EXCEPTION!!!!

  • David Z

    We as customers have to make it cheaper to be customer friendly and the way you do that is to hold them accountable EVERY TIME, NO EXCEPTION!!!!

    Well little to no exception, anyway. But agree nonetheless. :)

  • Bill

    I hear people complain regularly aobut customer service, and I do agree that there is much room for improvement. But, if we are fair, we will note that there are generally good reasons for most of the things we don’t like, and most of it is available, if we are not too lazy to read. Do we really expect any company to simply bend to our whims when we flat out didn’t read the contract or ask questions?

    As to the “one year” issue, please note that legal contracts must be required to be concluded in a one year time frame, except in unique situations. That is why you normally can not buy a ticket more than one year in advance. So, the year starts on the day that the contract was commenced, which is the transaction date. You call on Tuesday, and ask the price. You call back on Wednesday and reserve it. But, it is printed on Thursday, and your Credit card is billed. The transaction was on Thursday. If you call back on Friday, you are amending an existing contract, which is one day old.

    While it is frustrating to Mr. Overland, it does not appear that he actually ASKED anyone when the year started or ended. “Led to believe” often translates to “I thought/assumed/guessed, but didn’t ask.” Lesson to self, always ask for a date.

  • Kevin M

    I don’t believe there is any blanket requirement that legal contracts be concluded in a one-year time frame. Leases commonly extend for multiple years; certificates of deposit mature sometimes many years out; it happens all the time. Compensation agreements often extend more than a year as well.

    Rather, I believe that airlines only book 11 months out to avoid confusion in booking years. If, on January 28th, I could book a ticket not only for January 31st of this year, or January 31st of NEXT year, you can imagine how many reservations would end up on the wrong year – whether made by reservations agents, travel agents, consumers at their computers, or whomever. You’d end up with chaos.

  • Jay Drew

    Uh, Bill, the reason you can’t reserve flights more than one year ahead is that the externally-visible date fields on tickets and other printed material often contains only the day and month, no year. Your ticket to travel on 26APR has to mean 2009; if you could book it for 2010, there’s no way to show that.

    Despite the fact that etickets are the norm, there are still printed tickets in use, especially for international travel; the international standards for those specify that a date field has 2 digits (the day) and three characters (the month) and that’s it; no provision for a year.

    Sure, there are accounting rules that make handling contracts of more than one year’s duration trickier to handle, but any business worth calling a business would take those on if they could take your money more than a year ahead of when they’re expected to make good. More interestingly, many of those same accounting rules apply to any contract extending over the end of a fiscal year or even quarter; the airline has to accrue the funds and can’t declare them as “income” in their current period, for example.

    Setting all that aside, a dollar denominated voucher essentially amounts to a new agreeement between airline and passenger, so there’s no reason not to establish a 364-day lifetime for that agreement… other than avarice.

  • carver

    @Bill

    As an attorney I can categorically state that there is no general one year rule. You are thinking about the Statute of Frauds which require contracts to be in writing if they won’t be concluded within one year

    @Jay

    I hear what you are saying about the paper tickets, but I’m not convinced. Most tickets sold in the US are for domestic travel. 99.999% of those are e-tickets. SO fields don’t really matter. Also, many airlines don’t use 365 days as the cut-off. American airlines uses 11 months. Also hotels have cut-off dates as well and they’ve never used tickets.

    I suspect the real reason for the cut-off is pricing power. The revenue management system use models to price fares. All things being equal, the further in the future, the less accurate the pricing model.

  • Joe Farrell

    @Mort – did you not have control of what upgraded seats you accepted? If they had seats on HNL-ATL [very unlikely] then you could have gotten on that flight. That particular route has been in operation since Delta used DC-8′s. It STILL is in operation.

    If they changed your sked to ADD a stopover in LA -= then that is something that the folks on the telephone can deal with. If not – then a letter is in order- but – that being said – if they ADDED a slot for you to fly to LAX and then on to ATL – I would astonished if you could make that trip in time to meet the international transfer time.

    I had AA once book me from BDL-ORD-FCO using an upgrade which originally had a 2 hr and 10 min layover and they require you to have 120 min. They re-did the schedule and it was now only 108 minutes. I called to rebook and the agent tried to give me the song and dance that it was ok and there was no upgrade space on the flight from JFK-FCO [which they rarely open upgrade seats on]. I asked for a supervisor. The supervisor told me the same story = I then pointed out that the contract of carriage requires minimum connecting times and that I was not satisfying them – and if she did not rebook me then she needed to add her employee number and date of our call to the record so I had someone to blame if I missed the connection. [practically speaking it would not happen, but - it is good leverage to toss their own rules back at them].

    She then tried the ‘no upgrade seats’ gambit and I told her that american has made my routing illegal and needed to reaccommodate me. She put me on hold for 20 minutes – came back and kicked me over to ‘Special Services.’ You have to see that this was 2000 – I had just turned over 1Million miles on AA and was Gold for life – when that meant something. Still they tried to talk me into accepting the original routing.

    Now – I was being a little disingenuous since this route was well known to me – and they ALWAYS changed the BDL flight time after summer travel season ended and I was traveling in late September. I WANTED a JFK – FCO nonstop – but none were available. I’d take the routing through Chicago because it only added about 3 hours to the trip in real time since I am 2 hours by car from JFK and 30 min from BDL. And I’d rather be in business class than coach on an 8 hour red eye flight – with it being 9hrs coming home. This was also back when they had F class on the flights into ORD – now they are all RJ’s.

    Anyway, I pointed out my million mile status to special services and they worked out a deal for me by putting me on the JFK nonstop. I then pointed out that I was going back into BDL and that violated the terms of my fare – could they reissue the ticket and put me on the nonstop back into JFK as well. I had 119 minutes between planes on the connection back and was technically illegal but somehow a minute might not have convinced everyone – but I had aceppted that one up front so could easily complain – and there were more than 1 flight to BDL when I got back – if I missed the inbound connection I could catch another flight – not so with the Rome flight which was 1x a day.

    Back then common sense seemed to reign at the airlines and Special Services rebooked me on the JFK nonstop and it cost me $75 for the change fee then and few dollars more in fare. I KNOW – even with Lifetime platinum status now – that would not happen any longer. They could care less even about their OWN rules.