Why I´ll never fly Delta Airlines again

Pierre de Beaumarchais granted us with a wonderful saying: "Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n’est point d’éloge flatteur" (to the happy few French speakers of the Web2.0). I was happy to recommend my readers to purchase their storage solutions on Flash Memory Store, I am now delighted to tell you about the worst airline, no sorry, the worst company ever. Namely, Delta Airlines.

The following facts about Delta Airlines raise the two major issues of today´s IT world: Information Systems reliability and..Human nature.

Indeed, Deborah (my girlfriend) and I underwent the worse airline experience in our lifetime three weeks ago, as we were flying back to Europe from New York City - where we had spent half a year.

Delta Airlines did it all to us, check it out by yourself:

* their staff (amongst them the JFK check-in officer Jason Q.) were rude, extremely rude (pretending they didn´t hear us speaking, and hence not answering);
* they lied (they lost our ticket and said it was our move, to make us pay 100$ - which we had to do eventually) several times;
* they treated us like shit, asking me to run from a Terminal to another in less than 10 minutes to get a ticket from another service: what if I were a senior citizen? Couldn´t they repair their mistakes by themselves? In the end, the guy hadn´t even waited for me: he had taken another customer in line.
* their information system is crappy: they could find Deborah but not me on their system, and they had the guts to doubt the fact that I had purchased my ticket! Fortunately, Deborah had a printout of the electronic ticket purchase.
* they made us pay 50$ for a .9lbs overweight (we had four pieces of luggage: 3 less than 50lbs, the limit, and 1 of 50.9lbs)! - I almost forgot to mention that it had already been two hours since we had arrived at the airport.
* their information system had "forgotten" that we had asked to be seated together;
* and their information system told them our luggage were in the airport whilst our luggage were in the plane they didn´t want us to board in!
* consequently, not only did we wait 10 hours in JFK, they also lost our luggage;
* and neither their customer service nor their HQs ever replied to our letters, obviously.

I´ll never fly Delta Airlines again. I had flown Delta Airlines (well actually, their low-cost Song) many times in the US, up to the point that I had a Frequent Flyer membership card. Not only did they lose a customer, they converted me into a fanatic anti-Delta buzzer.

Their information system being defectuous (which is a direct threat to personal security), the least their personnel could do is care all the more about their customers. But Delta´s personnel was mean, arrogant, and both Deborah and I had never felt so angry and humiliated anytime in our lives before. Of course many things in life are much worse, but I wouldn´t want my beloved IT Addict blog readers to undergo the same uncomfortable experience as Deborah and I did. So don´t fly Delta Airlines, never, ever, whatsoever. And spread the word.



After Googlinvestigating for a few seconds, I noticed I´m not alone complaining about Delta Airline´s service. Here´s a sample of 6 websites amongst many:
http://www.deltareallysucks.com/
http://www.thedonovan.com/beth/archives/001244.html
http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/05/09/3249045.html
http://www.complaints.com/directory/2004/may/29/7.htm
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/delta_skymiles.html
http://blog.megacity.org/archives/000329.php

I also found a post on Loic le Meur´s blog, reporting the story of a Delta Airlines flight attendant who was basically fired because she was blogging...
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2004/10/the_bbc_talks_a.html