JetBlue provided me with excellent blogging fodder when their A320 took off from Oakland without me. Allow me to explain.
I had a 9pm flight from Oakland to New York on Saturday. The weather was particularly bad that night on the east coast, so I was not surprised to learn that the flight was delayed to 9:50 when I checked in. When I walked past the gate, sure enough, the departure time was 9:50 on the placard at the counter. The gate was crowded, so I sat at the next gate over and played gameboy (Advance Wars) until about 9:35. I walked back to the gate and I was met with incredulous looks of “Where were you? I’m sorry hun, but they took off with out you!”
WTF?
I don’t find tantrums that useful or enjoyable, but this was cause enough, so I gave them a mini one. They were supposed to page me, right? They said they did but I couldn’t hear because I was at the next gate. And what about that departure time? Oh, that was only an “estimated” departure time. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that “Departure 9:50pm” was up for interpretation.
So I get pushed to the 10:30 to Boston with a connecting to JFK. But that gets delayed to 12:15am, so I will miss the connecting flight. They ask if a connecting flight at 5pm is ok, or a non-stop tomorrow morning… hell no bitch. So I tell them I want to go to Boston anyway, and I will take my chances with stand-by, which is usually reliable for one seat. All the while they are trying to tell me how nice they are being by putting me on a different flight free of charge. In Boston, since I was already first in the stand-by line, I get a seat on the next flight with very little layover time and get to JFK smoothly from there.
My first comment is that on the whole, in retrospect, this only delayed me by about 4.5 hours, which is very little to complain about with respect to modern disaster stories of air travel. BUT, that does not mean to imply that this was not unbelievably frustrating and maddening, especially coming home from vacation on a redeye. Sappy note: I didn’t get to visit my dad for father’s day because I got home late.
I had specific reasons why I thought it was fine to sit where I sat, and unfortunately, I believe JetBlue failed me. When I was told of the delay, I was not told that the plane was delayed about 45minutes, I was told that it was delayed until 9:50. To me, this is very clearly an updated time of departure. This is not an estimate. If it said ESTIMATE then I would have gotten the point. But it didn’t. It said “Departure 9:50″. If it said “Departure 9pm Delay 50m” (I CAN add) that would have made the point as well. There is no way I would have sat at the next gate over if it gave the info as a delay instead of an updated time of departure. So F you JetBlue.
The other reason is the ass-dumb paging system. The pages were designed to be local to the specific gate, not airport-wide like the TSA security announcements. So in otherwords, if you could hear the announcement, you were already at the gate anyway, and the announcement was pointless. I, sitting literally 100 feet to the left of the gate, could not hear the pages. And believe me, I would not have missed a page with my name on it–I was even listening for it.
So to wrap up my complaints: They told me the plane was leaving late at a certain time and then left earlier. And they called my name, but only loud enough so that I could hear it only if I was there already. Damn.
To top it off, for fun (i guess?), I spent about 20m on the phone with customer service only to get a supervisor who clearly either didn’t understand my arguement, or was a bitch. One or the other.
Will I fly JetBlue again? Maybe. They do have the little TVs and I’m more sensitive to the lowest price than anything else. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate them now.
Marc B
Brad L
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