Booking Flights on the Phone
I'm heading to Houston for an extended Father's Day weekend, and I just booked my flights. I wanted to use a $240 credit I gained earlier this year, and I also wanted to be sure they knew I would have a cat on the plane, so I booked the flight over the phone to make sure those two things happened. Otherwise, I would have very gladly booked the flights on the web, as usual.
The phone call took 31 minutes. You'd think "hey, I'd like to fly on this flight on this day and this other flight on this other day, and I'll have a cat, and here's where you can look up my $240 credit, and here's my frequent flyer number, and this is my credit card number" would take, oh, about five minutes. Maximum.
If you thought that, you would be wrong.
When I was traveling extensively on Delta several years ago, I would spend that long on the phone, but most of the time, I would be on hold, just waiting for someone to pick up on the other end while listening to awful music that was terribly choppy coming out of my cell phone's speakers. Then, it would take a mere handful of minutes to confirm my reservation, look up my SkyMiles number, and charge the flights to my credit card. That was that, and most of the time, I could have my speaker-phone enabled and be patiently paying attention for a human voice coming across the line while simultaneously doing something entirely different. (Speaking of Delta, check out their new red logo. Isn't that strange?)
Not so with US Airways, apparently, as nearly the entire 31 minutes of my conversation involved listening to some lady breathing heavily into the other end of the line, listening to her slowly click away at her keyboard, or repeating myself over and over. Calling US Airways is like trying to convince a brick wall to do something other than stand around or fall, and as a rather impatient person in the first place, I grew very agitated with the whole 31-minute process.
Regardless, I have some episodes of Alias waiting for me, courtesy of Netflix, and I'm positively dying to relax with them right now.
Comments
love the new logo!
Posted by: mum | June 8, 2007 04:26 PM
Sorry to hear about the lousy service you received. Let me ask you, would you have paid an extra 10% surcharge to have spoken with someone who was very intelligent and who knew what they were doing? Just curious. I can just imagine the voice response system..."For an extra surcharge, press one to book your flight with an employee who received an 'exceeds expectations' on their last performance evaluation." There might be a demand for that. Just a thought.
Posted by: arc | June 8, 2007 09:23 PM