Good: I just spoke to the U.S. Airways reservations desk and booked my wife and kids on the same flight for tomorrow that they’d originally been scheduled on for today.  That’s the good news.

Bad: The fare for the Tuesday flight is $100 higher than the fare for the Monday flight at the same time, so they charged me $500 for the fare increase.  Funny, but when an airline cancels your flight and puts you onto a cheaper one, I don’t recall them refunding the difference to you.

Unbelievable: When I called tonight to change the reservation, the agent informed me that there was already a fee waiver coded on my wife’s reservation.

Our friend the nurse went out of her way to document my wife’s illness as required by the U.S. Airways customer relations department.  I spent five hours hovering over my computer, trying unsuccessfully to get the nurse’s letter to transmit successfully to their fax machine.  All of this was apparently unnecessary.

U.S. Airways had my phone number — they asked for it when I made the initial reservation — so if they decided to grant my request to waive the fees, why didn’t they call and tell me?

Why didn’t the customer relations agent I spoke to at 4:00pm when I couldn’t get through by fax tell me that the fees had been waived?

It’s just unbelievable.  They decided to give me what I’d asked for, but they couldn’t even do that right!

God willing, my wife and kids will be home safely tomorrow.  We’ll be $500 poorer, and I’ll never get back the many hours I wasted today dealing with this, but we did get one thing out of this experience: the wisdom to know that we will never again willingly give U.S. Airways a penny of our hard-earned money.

I got the letter from the nurse in Georgia, confirming that my wife was too ill to fly today, at 3:00pm today, Eastern time.

Ten minutes later, I queued up that letter as well as an explanatory cover letter to be sent to the fax number that the customer relations agent had given me.

Five hours later, the fax still hasn’t been successfully transmitted, although I’ve been trying to send it pretty much every five minutes.  I have gotten mostly busy signals, occasionally no answer, and rarely a connection to the fax machine followed by the other end hanging up while the first page was being transmitted.  Now, presumably because it’s after hours in Tempe where I was trying to fax to, the fax machine rings and rings without answering every time I try to send the fax.

To rule out a problem with my home fax machine, I also tried to send the fax through my employer’s eFax account.  I queued it up in eFax seven times, and it failed all seven times, which means that eFax tried to send it many more times than that, since eFax makes numerous attempts to deliver the fax before giving up.

It is impossible to understand why the customer relations department for a huge international airline would rely on a single, physical fax machine for urgent correspondence from customers.  I mean, haven’t they ever heard of eFax, for heaven’s sake?  Actually, there is one possible explanation for this anomaly: they want it to be difficult for customers to contact them.

At around 4:00pm, I called the U.S. Airways customer relations department again, to find out how I could get the letter from the nurse to them since the fax machine was not working.  I waited on hold for around 40 minutes before being connected to an agent, who informed me that there was absolutely nothing he could do.  There was no email address I could send the documents to that would be read quickly; there was no other fax machine I could send the letter to; there was no way he could get in touch with the agent I’d spoken with before to make alternate arrangements.  That part of our exchange is so astounding that it bears repeating (emphasis mine):

ME: “Can you look up the name of the agent I spoke with before and speak to her about this to try to figure out a solution?”

HIM: “No, I’m sorry, there are so many people here that I probably wouldn’t be able to find her.”

ME: “Well, don’t you have a telephone directory?  Can’t you call her extension?”

HIM: “No, we’re not allowed to make outgoing calls to other people in our department.”

The U.S. Airways customer relations department is now closed for the day.  Since I waited all day for them to resolve this issue, my wife and kids still don’t have tickets to fly out on tomorrow’s flight, and I don’t even know whether there are seats left on it.  I’m faced with the choice of either (a) calling the reservations desk, making the change, paying the $750, and then trying to get it back from U.S. Airways after the fact (just because they promised they’d waive the fees doesn’t mean they’ll give back the money once they’ve got it!), or (b) telling my wife to make the two-hour drive to the airport tomorrow under the assumption that I’ll be able to get it straightened out in the morning before it’s time for them to go through security (an unlikely scenario, since the customer relations department doesn’t open until 9:00am Eastern time, and their flight departs at 11:13am).  Or I suppose there’s another option, (c) making them stay yet another day in Georgia, causing the kids to miss two days of school and imposing on their host who needs to go back to her own job.

I’ve just called the news tips hotline for The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, WBZ TV 4 and WHDH TV 7 and told them about the story.  This seems like the kind of crossover story (human interest + the airlines in a tailspin + the economy) that might just get some air-time.  Whichever of them calls back first gets an exclusive .

I waited on hold for almost two hours before finally being connected to someone in the customer relations department at U.S. Airways.

I started out by asking if I could just get someone to read my letter rather than being forced to tell the whole story again, and she said that was impossible — they get too many faxes to be able to find a particular fax, so no one would be able to review my fax until it got distributed to agents with the rest of them.

So I told the agent my story and asked, once again, for a reduction or waiver of the ticket change fees.

And, once again, the agent informed me that the terms and conditions of our tickets did not include a waiver for medical emergencies and therefore the fees could not be waived.

Up to now, I have been nothing but polite to all of the U.S. Airways employees with whom I have dealt.  I have acknowledged, to each employee, that I understood that the airline’s policy was not under his/her control.  I politely asked to whom I could speak who might be able to override the policy.  And then I went off like a good little boy and spoke to the person on the next rung of the ladder.

I’m sorry to say that my politeness ran out during this call.  I lost my temper.  I yelled.  I berated the agent for yet again mouthing the platitudes about “terms and conditions” and “airline policies,” when she knew as well as I did that the terms, conditions and policies were created by the airline and the airline could change them on a whim.  I listed all of the people and media outlets to whom I was going to complain if the airline didn’t solve the problem.  I pointed out how absurd it was that the airline gives passengers nothing when it has to cancel flights due to circumstances (supposedly) beyond its control but then expects passengers to pay an exorbitant fee when they cannot fly due to circumstances beyond their control.  I told her that it was simply reprehensible that the airline expected my wife, who spent the night alternating between lying on the bathroom floor, vomiting, and having diarrhea, to get on a plane with her five children a few hours later.  I pointed out how outrageous it was that the airline preferred for my wife to expose many people at the airport and everyone on both of her flights to a serious, potentially lethal virus, rather than letting her and her family fly the next day.

She told me to calm down, put me on hold for a few minutes, and then came back and claimed that if I faxed them documentation from a doctor that my wife was unable to fly this morning, they would waive the fees.

My wife did not see a doctor.  There was no need, since the friend she’s visiting is a registered nurse who has seen this flu travel all over the hospital where she works and who had it herself a few days ago.  However, our friend the nurse is going to write a letter, and with any luck, that will be good enough.  We’ll see.

I faxed the letter below to the U.S. Airways customer relations department over 40 minutes ago.  So far, no response (no surprise there).

I then tried to call them using the toll-free voice number on the slip of paper they gave me at the airport (to tell them I had sent them an urgent complaint via fax), and I was greeted with a recording informing me that their call volume (complaint volume, more like) was so high that they couldn’t take my call and I should write to them through their Web site instead.

Then I tried calling the long-distance phone number given on the slip of paper as “alternate tel,” and I got a recording informing me that I had dialed the wrong extension (I didn’t dial an extension!).  Love it!

Finally, I tried the original toll-free voice number again, and this time I actually got put into a queue, where I’ve been waiting for almost 25 minutes.

February 23, 2009

Customer Relations Department
U.S. Airways
Fax: (480) 693-2305

To whom it may concern:

This letter concerns the reservation with code ______ for my wife, ______ Kamens, and our five children, ______, ______, ______, ______, an ______ (flying as a lap baby).

I have just posted the attached article on my blog at http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/2009/02/23/us-airways-stops-pretending-to-care-about-its-customers/.

You have until 2:00pm (Eastern time) today to contact me about changing my family’s reservations without charging us $750 in change fees.

If I do not hear from you by then, then I will be sending a copy of this article, along with a suitably outraged cover letter, to:

• The Boston Globe
• The Boston Herald
• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Arizona Republic
• Senator Ted Kennedy
• Senator John Kerry
• Rep. Michael Capuano
• President Barack Obama
• Rep. James L. Oberstar, the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation
• Rep. Jerry F. Costello, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation
• Senator John D. Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
• Every travel-related Web site I can find

In the end, perhaps we will end up being force to give in to your highway robbery, but I assure you that I will do everything in my power to make it cost you far more than that in lost sales, bad publicity, and future efforts by the government to clamp down on outrages like this.

Furthermore, I assure you that no one from my family will ever again willingly set foot on a U.S. Airways plane. You may get $750 from us today, but you’ll never see another penny of our money.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

There’s an old Dilbert strip where the boss makes his disdain for his employees so clear that Dilbert blurts out, “Good Lord!  You’ve stopped even pretending to be on our side!”  This is what came to mind to me today when I realized that U.S. Airways has stopped even pretending to care about their customers.

My wife and our five children are in Georgia.  On the flight there, she suffered all of the little indignities which the airlines have invented to torture us: a fee for checked bags (thus making security and boarding take longer as people try to cram all of their things into carry-ons), no free snacks (so you have to find room in your carry-ons for food too), a $2 charge for drinks (particularly outrageous since beverages can’t be brought through security and since it’s actually unhealthy not to drink while flying), and even a charge for pillows and blankets.  My wife grumbled, but she tolerated it; with most of the airlines engaging in similar acts of highway robbery, what choice did she have?

But, as the saying goes, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”  My wife was scheduled to fly home with the kids today.  Unfortunately, at 3:30 this morning, she called and informed me that she had caught the stomach flu running rampant in Virginia (“Noroviruses, which cause acute gastroenteritis or “stomach flu,” appear to be on the upswing in Virginia,” according to the Virginia Department of Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that the flu is currently “widespread” in Virginia) and had spent the last several hours in the bathroom experiencing all of the symptoms commonly associated with the illness (again according to the VA DOH, “nausea, vomiting, watery non-bloody diarrhea, stomach cramps, and low-grade fever”).  Her host in Virginia, a nurse, had gotten it several days before, so we knew what it was; we also knew that in her condition, there was no way my wife would be able to handle the two-hour drive to the airport or a four-hour airplane trip, including a change of planes, with five young children.  Not to mention the fact that if she did take the trip, she would expose every passenger on both flights to the virus.

Armed with this information, I called the U.S. Airways reservations line and asked how to receive a medical waiver of the $150 per ticket ($750 total, for tickets that originally cost a little under $2,000) change fee.  The reservations agent informed me that no such waivers were available.  I asked whether there was anyone there with the authority to say otherwise, and the agent said that she could transfer me to her supervisor if I wished, but the supervisor would probably give me the same answer.

Thinking that perhaps talking to someone in person would produce better results, I threw on my clothes and hurried over to the airport.  The agents and “station chief” with whom I spoke there were very friendly, but the end result was the same — no one had the authority to reduce or waive the ticket change fee, and they didn’t know of anyone who did.  The best they could do was to suggest that the kids all be moved to a later flight the same day (apparently not incurring the fee for a same-day change), and I hop onto a plane and fly down there to take them home, leaving my wife fly back when she feels better.  This, however, was no help, because the cost of my round-trip ticket was the same as the cost of changing all the kids’ tickets to fly tomorrow.

I left the airport having accomplished nothing except to acquire a slip of paper with the contact information for the U.S. Airways customer relations department.

At 9:00am, when the they opened, I called them and told my story for the fourth time.  The agent transferred me to a supervisor, to whom I told the story a fifth time, and I received the same answer.

Every agent and supervisor informed me that U.S. Airways “had no choice” about charging me the fee because those were the terms of the tickets we purchased.  When I pointed out that those “terms” were written by U.S. Airways and could therefore be changed by U.S. Airways, they had no response.

When an airline cancels a flight for whatever reason, do they pay every passenger $150?  No, they most certainly do not, and yet these same airlines, which have been coddled by the U.S. government for years, to the point where they know they can get away with anything, think that it’s OK to charge passengers $150 per ticket for circumstances which are just as outside of their control as a sick pilot, a broken-down plane or a winter snowstorm.

But the $750 in ransom I’m going to end up having to pay to get my family home from Georgia is hardly the worst of it.  As I noted above, what the airline apparently wanted my wife to do was to go to the airport today, get on their planes, and expose thousands of passengers, traveling all over the country, to an extremely nasty flu virus that can actually kill people.  My wife made the responsible decision not to do that, despite the fact that we will pay for that decision with money we don’t have.  How many people don’t make that same decision?  How many people fly sick because they can’t afford not to?  How many days of worker productivity are lost because people become ill as a result of being exposed to illnesses on airplanes?  How much real human suffering is a direct result of U.S. Airways’ misguided policies?  How many people have died as a result of them?

“Good Lord!  You’ve stopped even pretending to be on our side!”  Indeed.