Saturday, July 31, 2010

A whole different animal . . . indeed.

The reader's digest version of the first two experiences is this. My parents live in Montpelier. Frontier has a tendency to give very little time on layovers. They lost my luggage and had to fly it in to Pocatello via Delta for me to pick up. Forget the fact that Montpelier is 1.5 hours from Pocatello. I had my friend, whom I was going to visit anyway, pick it up and it all worked out. 
The second time, I was on my way home from my mom's house and since she had bought a car seat for Xyla, she sent it home with us. I checked it at the counter and it was the only car seat I was going to be able to use to get from the airport home. They lost it. They also apologized because they didn't have a spare for me to use. "So sorry". I was able to find someone I knew who had an extra but that added 2 hours of airport time with an infant to my trip. It was a nightmare. Fortunately, when they did find it (on a plane in California) they delivered it to my home since I clearly wouldn't be able to bring my child to the airport to pick it up.
This trip, I paid for two tickets since Xyla is "technically" over two years old. On the way home, I had two bags we carried on plus my personal item, which was a bag my sister gave me to fly with and I was unfamiliar with. Long story shot in the attempt to deplane smoothly, my license fell out of the bag and into the seat-back pocket. It was found by the crew and left at the baggage counter. 
The next day, it took several people to try to call and apparently only one was wise enough to know that when you call a long distance number you have to dial the area code, even if said area code is the same as the one for the airport. After a discussion of "I live an hour away so, acutally, I can't just drop by the desk and pick it up at my convenience." There was a declaration of "we don't usually send them to people through the mail, but in this instance I think we can make an exception. I will put it in the outgoing mail today." I was so excited that I was getting positive customer service that I didn't ask her name. Shame on me, I know better. At the time it wasn't a big deal because I didn't need it for anything for two weeks. I know the mail takes about 5 days to get from OKC to Stillwater sometimes, though I don't know exactly why. After five business days, I didn't see anything in the mail. Figuring that someone higher than her may have railroaded the plan, I thought I'd call and check on the status of the id. The guy I spoke with told me he was the only one there and that my id wasn't in the place they would normally leave those things so it most likely wasn't there any more. I was thinking if it was, since I would be going through there that day anyway, I could drop by and get it. Since it wasn't, I thanked him for his time and hung up. Again without asking his name. (Again, I know better than this.) I have been to their service desk and, having sympathy for how long it takes them to check in a flight, I didn't want to back up the process. They nearly made me miss my plane once because they were having difficulty finding a reservation for a passenger who was checking in for a much later flight and instead of asking that person to wait they almost made the whole flight miss the plane.  
Yesterday, it was the end of the second week since the license was supposedly mailed out and I still haven't seen hide nor hair of it. I called them to try to track down if it was a problem on their end or a problem on the postal service end (don't get me started on them). See it is important next week because I have to have it to pick up my federal id on Tuesday and I just needed to know if I should go get a duplicate or not. I made sure to call with plenty of time left in the business day. 
Gail, Gail is the name of the person who helped me this time. I related all of this to her and she acted like it was unreasonable for me to be so exasperated about this whole thing and that she "was" just trying to help me. Just before she hangs up the phone she says, "I am going to make a note of this and we will try to find out what is going on and someone might call you back." I said, "Gail, I don't want that to be a 'someone might call you back' I want you to say that someone will call me back." She got frustrated. I was more than frustrated. She said, "I am doing my best here, I have to go find out who was working and all . . . " I stopped her short and said, "I know you have some work to do looking into this but I want you to own the responsibility to ensure that someone will call me back and let me know what is going on, it is very important that I know what I need to do from here."
I knew that she wouldn't be calling me back. She still hasn't, no one has. There is someone on shift at that airport from 4 am to 10 pm even on weekends and no one has followed up with this. I left for the dmv to get a duplicate license as soon as I hung up with her. It will not be resolved by Tuesday. I know other people love Frontier for the no fees for the first checked bag and because they don't have to spend hours in Denver waiting for their other flights, etc. So I figure this is mostly just me, so I probably will not be using their service again.

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