AirTran

I recently took a vacation to visit my friend Wolf down in parts far enough from here that driving would have been more than flying. Upon perusing the cost of tickets, I determined that AirTran was the cheapest and the most direct. I had no experience with AirTran, despite having travelled at least once every couple of months for most of my life, but reviews were decent, so I (poor, foolish me) went ahead and booked them.

Dear readers (if indeed any of you are still reading after my absurdly long hiatus), please do yourself a favor and do not use AirTran unless it is the only option. The customer service bucket? They took it.

Due to circumstances which could be another entry here entirely, I was five minutes late for my 7:30 a.m. flight home. I assumed that I would be put on another flight and perhaps made to spend slightly more money, but that I would still be able to get home relatively soon. That was, while not making me any happier, fine.

What actually happened was this. When I got in the line to the check-in counter to go deal with this issue, I tried to ask the woman directing the line about it. Before I could do more than say that I had missed my flight, she snapped at me rudely and said that I'd have to go on standby. She didn't even tell me whether or not I was in the right line, which was all I wanted to know from her.

Then I got to the woman behind the counter and began to ask her. At the same point in my question, she interrupted me to tell me the same thing and peremptorily asked for my ID. She looked at me as at a small child who had misbehaved or a dog which had shat in her best shoes and told me to go to gate FarAway39 and wait to be told what to do.

Annoyed, but glad to know where to go, I left. When I got to the gate, I went up to the counter to see if there was anything else I should be doing. I was informed off-handedly that I was number five on the list of standbys and that the flight was oversold, so not to bother waiting. The next flight would be four hours later at the next gate over.

At the next gate, they told me that I was number 12 on a standby list of nearly 30. Having now been at this airport for two hours past when I was supposed to arrive home and having been treated horribly thus far, I persisted in asking what else they could do to get me home. At length, they asked if I had been confirmed on any flight. No, I said, what does that mean and why hasn't it been done already? It meant that they should have, at the check-in counter, confirmed me on a seat for the first open flight after mine when they put me on standby, and if they had, I'd have had a seat on the 2:00 flight. By the time I found this out, however, the only seat they could get me was for the 9:00 flight, the last one of the day. Fuming, I waited as they called perhaps five standbys on to that flight and sent me back to the previous gate for the next flight, going out at 3:00.

Back at the first gate, I went up again and explained a little less patiently my situation. They told me that I was now 15 on a list of 40 standbys, and that there was nothing they could do about it. Predictably, this flight, too, went by without me, and I was sent to yet another gate to wait for the 4:30 flight.

At this gate, at last, someone seemed to give a shit. They seemed shocked at how I'd been treated thus far, and not only moved me up to number 1 on the standby list, but then figured out that they could confirm me a seat on their flight. At last, I would go home!

And then the flight was delayed by weather. Hah.

But I think the best part is that after all of that, AirTran sent me a survey. Well, I guess they won't like that data!