I get my tickets late Tuesday afternoon and look at the travel itinerary and low and behold I have a 12 hour layover in Minneapolis. I wanted to throttle someone. So instead of sitting in the airport all day I am going to crash at a hotel and fly out tonight for Europe. Traveling from Hawaii to Europe always comes with some major pain and significant jet lag but this is bordering on ridiculous.
I flew Northwest a lot when I was living in Washington DC and was flying to Asia every month. I have 400,000+ frequent flyer miles with them, when I tried to upgrade they told me they had no more seats. Ok I am cool with that but when I get to the airport they tell me I can pay $350.00 to upgrade on one leg but they are not allowing people to use their mileage to upgrade. To add insult to injury it would have only been 7500 miles as my ticket was a full fare ticket.
During the flight I get up from the cattle car section and look in Business class and they have about 25% of the seats filled. This pisses me off more than ever and I proceeded to tell the Flight Attendant how displeased I am. She tells me it’s Northwest way of making money by locking out the majority of seats to frequent flyers. She said that many of their frequent flyers are not happy with changes to their system. I might as well flush the mileage down a toilet. Do you know how many flights you have to take to get 400,000+ miles so much for customer relations.
Time for a very personal letter to the Chairman of Northwest Airlines.
Northwest airlines stranded me in Detroit. I’d flown 24 hours from Bamako in Mali in West Africa. I flew through Paris to Detroit. I was one hour away from flying home to Pittsburgh, loaded on the plane, when they said the flight had been postponed until the following morning.
Me and some other passengers called Northwest and got confirmation numbers for a later flight that evening. But when we went to the ticket counter, the woman there said “You don’t have a seat?”
“But I have a confirmation number,” protested the guy in front of me.
“That only means you have a reservation,” she said, “That doesn’t mean you have a seat.”
Long story short, we finally got a later flight after a delay on the runway. They lost our luggage and we didn’t get home until 2 a.m.
Northwest – never again.