Thank You for Flying ______

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to use. From Kayak, I got transferred to the airline for actual booking.

With Delta you have to basically search again with some form fields filled in for you, but their website is confusing, slow and does not help at all. I managed though, in the end, to find the correct flights, entered my booking information, chose my seats (nice touch) and finally proceeded to checkout. It wasn’t the best, but certainly not the worst experience I had. Yet.

Upon completion, I was greeted with an error message. They got my order, but had “problems processing your[my] tickets” and I should call customer support. There was a first minor glitch. I used the German translation of the Delta website, but the error message was in English, except for the sentence, that asked me to call customer support, it began in German and half way through switched to English. Finally it said, my “reference number” is _________ and there was only a blank space.

It was Saturday night in Berlin and of course the European Customer support was out partying. So I was transferred to the US “with no additional fees”. The line was worse than anything I knew from Skype. The support folks, while trying to sound supportive and generally slowing down when I mentioned I called from Germany, did not help a lot.

The first lady checked my flight status and told me I had cancelled it. When I objected, she insisted I did cancel it, probably without realising. I tried to explain that unless “buy now” really means, “cancel”, I am pretty sure I did not cancel the flight myself. Until we got there, I had to give her my entire flight itinerary, four flights in total, over the phone. With the bad line, that call took around ten minutes until she insisted transferring me to “online support”. When I asked what they would do, she told me that they would walk me through the website for another try. I said if I should just try again, I can do that on my own and if there would be any problem, I would call again.

So I went through the procedure once again. With the same result, me calling support over the stupid error message. This time, I asked directly for online support to see what they would be able to do. The lady there was very supportive again, found my two attempts to book quickly and said I cancelled both. I explained, again, I did not cancel them and she was happy to book the flight for me over the phone. She asked me to hold for a few moments while she talked to somebody else for this. Ok. All I got was a click and beep-beep-beep, like being hung up on. Now this could have been an accidental wrong button, or the line dropping; whatever it was, it was very unfortunate because I had the feeling that this person would just book me and be done with it.

I called again, this time it took a while to find my flight info. But the guy was as quick as her predecessor in accepting my order by phone. Only to tell me that the total would be around $4000 for all flights, whereas I was quoted not even $1200 on the website. He said he would transfer me to a person that I could talk to about the fare.

One and a half sentences into my explanation of how I got here, the lady here interrupted me, telling me that there was online support and I should be talking to them. I repeatedly told her that online support just transferred me to her and that I do not want to go back, but she just cut me off and made the transfer.

I hung up then, being mildly enraged about the ongoing stupidity and went to watch Life of Brian.

This morning I called Delta again and got to the European customer support. The person here was the fastest finding my, now three(!), cancelled bookings, and quickly proceeded to take the order on the phone. He even booked then at a little lower fare than the website quoted. That should cover the costs of calling the support hotline but not much more.

I am booked now, but that was a pretty awful experience.

I realise that customer support is hard and I realise that for an airline of Delta’s size it is not possible to have everybody “in the know”. But that just illustrates some of the weaknesses of outsourced customer support. If you call more than once, they don’t know anything about previous conversations. Different parts of the organisation move you hither and forth, only wasting your time. The fact that the individual agent is encouraged to process as many calls as possible by the hour, they do get more money then, leads to some just trying to get rid of you. And finally, the fundamental problem was probably the misdirected error message that was unable to quote my reference number that tied all my problems to a case they would hopefully be able to track in their system. An IT-error caused everybody to lose time, money and patience. Yet IT never heard about it, all I talked to, was customer support geard towards closing sales. I do not feel inclined to file a bug report for their website and if it were not for this report, nobody would ever hear about this. For Delta that means that they keep losing money on unnecessary support incidents and leaving customers.

I now have one experience of how bad an airline can be (and this is booking only, I have not flown yet) and I am sure to avoid Delta in the future. Just to get to know the others and hopefully find one I can live with eventually. But my hopes are not that high.