I got my monthly US Airways Dividend Miles statement in email today.  Here’s what I sent in response:

March 23, 2009

Dividend Miles Service Center
US Airways
Post Office Box 20050
Phoenix, AZ 85036

To whom it may concern:

Please cancel my US Airways Dividend Miles account, number [elided], PIN [elided], and my wife [elided]’s account, number [elided], PIN [elided].

Please remove all records of us from your systems, including our accounts on the Dividend Miles Web site and any email addresses and telephone numbers which you have on record for either of us.

Please note that both my wife and I have signed this letter authorizing you to cancel our accounts.

After our recent experience with your airline (see attached), we will never again willingly avail ourselves of your services. Even if we are forced to do so out of necessity, it certainly won’t be often enough to justify belonging to your frequent-flier program.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

[elided] Kamens

encl: March 10, 2009 letter to US Airways CEO Doug Parker

Executive summary

As expected, US Airways refused to refund the $500 we paid to get my wife home after her illness, and instead offered me five $150 travel vouchers, one for each ticket.  I told the customer relations rep that she could send the vouchers if she wanted to, but as she well knew, it was extremely unlikely that I would ever use them.  The rep proved herself to be both clueless and willing to lie to my face.

Details

We got a voicemail message at 3:42pm yesterday (names and phone numbers changed because I don’t want to be rude):

Hi, Mr. Kamens.  This is Jane Doe at Customer Relations, US Airways. Just responding to your letter and we’d like to have a full conversation about your ongoing concerns regarding the reissue fee and ad collect to reissue your tickets when your family was ill, and we wish them good health and godspeed and a speedy recovery. If you could call me — I work from 7 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon Monday through Friday. I can be reached at 123-456-7890 and I’d be more than glad to speak with you. Have a great day sir.

A couple of minutes later we got a second message:

Hi Mr. Kamens. This is Jane Doe calling from US Airways. Wanted to specify the time of the timezones that I work in. It’s mountain standard time. Right now this call is going out at 12:44. That would make your time 2:44. I believe we do currently have a 2-hour difference. So, that information I hope it’s helpful in connecting with us, and we’d be more than glad, again, to speak with you. Have a great day sir.

Apparently, no one told Jane that DST started on March 8, and that since Arizona doesn’t observe DST, the time difference between Arizona and Massachusetts is currently three hours, not two.

I called the given number and reached her directly on the first try (wow!).  I’m not going to transcribe the whole call, but I’ll share some interesting tidbits:

Jane: I want to make sure that we’ve addressed everything that we can, find a way to bring closure to your situation, and I was just wondering how can we do that?  How can we help make this better?

Me: Well, I mean I think I’ve said pretty much everything I have to say in my letter about what I thought went wrong, so I think the ball’s in your court.  Why don’t you tell me what you think you can do to make this better.

Jane: What would bring closure in your mind’s eye?

Me: Well, I mean, I think… (pause for thought)

Jane: I understand the severity of your wife’s situation.  and I understand that she had the flu and she was sick and it was going to make it difficult to fly.  Across the board, every airline has reissue fees and they have to reprice the ticket when you make changes, and that’s just to make changes…

Me: OK, so that’s not true.  Southwest Airlines has no reissue fee, they charge zero dollars…

Jane: It’s the only airline, you’re correct, Southwest is the only airline that does not. [caught in a lie!]

…

Jane: [claims that US Airways had no choice but to charge the difference in price of the two tickets]

Me: If the CEO of your company wanted to give someone a free ticket to fly on his airline, would he be allowed to do that, legally?

Jane: No.

Me: He wouldn’t be allowed, you never give away free travel on your airline, you’ve never given anyone a free trip anywhere?

Jane: You said on another airline. [no I didn't!]

Me: No, I mean on US Airways.  If your CEO wanted to give someone a free ticket on US Airways and not charge for it, would he be legally allowed to do that?

Jane: [silence]

Me: How would that be different from saying to my wife, “You know, we understand that you were sick, and we’re not going to charge you for these tickets on the next day’s flight because we understand that you were unable to fly because you were sick.  So it’s just erroneous to say that you would be unable to give my wife new tickets without charging her.  It’s a decision that the airline makes to do that.”

…

Jane: [claimed that every other airline except Southwest would have charged us to reissue the tickets for my wife]

Me: And what are their policies about people who can’t fly because they are ill?

Jane: That’s up to their way of doing business and what their business model is.  I do know that they have reissue fees, they do have ad collects. [In other words, either she knows zip about what the other airlines would have done about our situation and was lying again, or she knows that some of them would have waived the difference in cost and didn't want to admit it.]

Me: What if my wife had shown up at the airport and she was visibly too sick to fly.  What would the gate staff have done?

Jane: If an individual is too sick to fly, they don’t fly.

Me: And then does the airline reissue their tickets?

Jane: [silence]

Me: If the gate staff makes a decision that that person is a danger to other passengers and they have to be taken off that flight, do they give them new tickets for the next day’s flight?

Jane: [silence]

Me: My impression is that they would have to reissue their tickets and they wouldn’t charge for it.  So the only difference here between that situation and this one is that I called up and said, ‘My wife has been spending all night on the floor of the bathroom throwing up and having diarrhea and can’t fly and if she shows up at the airport, that’s going to be visibly obvious, and I want to make arrangements.’  That’s the only difference.  And I had a letter from the nurse who took care of her and diagnosed her, verifying that that was the case.

Jane: You and I both know all these facts.  We have communicated all of your concerns to the various divisions that need to know about your concerns with the reissue fee.  But right now we’re trying to bring closure to your situation [there's that word again!] and how can we do that?

Me: In terms of closure to my situation, the only form of closure that would be in any way a form of closure would be to give me back the $500 that I had to pay for my wife to fly home the next day.

Jane: I can’t refund the reissue fees.  What I can do is send you out five electronic vouchers in the amount of $150 per voucher… issued in the names of the passengers who flew.

Me: So, I mean, if you want to issue vouchers to me, that’s fine, but the odds are that I will not use them, because I have no desire to ever fly on your airline again, so that’s not really bringing me any closure.

There was a bit more back-and-forth after that, but that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

Leaving aside the question of whether we should have been charged to change my wife’s tickets, at no time during this conversation did Jane ever admit that US Airways had done anything wrong with regard to any of the terrible experiences my wife and I had dealing with the airline throughout the day.

At no time during this conversation did Jane ever apologize in any way for any of what we experienced.

And this is one of the people that US Airways employs to placate angry customers!  Astounding!

Interestingly, it’s now over an hour after our conversation ended, and the travel vouchers still haven’t arrived.  I wonder if they ever will.

UPDATE: The vouchers did arrive later in the day, with the following introduction:

Dear Mr. Kamens,

On behalf of US Airways and the entire Customer Relations team, please accept our sincere apology for the travel difficulties you experienced. Your concerns have been thoroughly documented and your comments have been shared with the appropriate management teams to help us improve our service.

We are so sorry for the difficulties that you experienced re-booking your flights. We have shared your experience with the manager of the reservation center.

We have authorized five Electronic Travel with Us Voucher (E-TUV) in the amount of $150.00 as a gesture of goodwill.

Wow, look at that, an apology!  What a shame that it came so late and with such a useless “gesture of goodwill” attached to it.

I posted a complaint about our US Airways experience at http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=51307.

March 10, 2009

Doug Parker
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
US Airways
111 West Rio Salado Parkway
Tempe, AZ 85281

Dear Mr. Parker,

I am writing about the outrageous experience which has prompted my wife and I to decide that we will never willingly fly on US Airways again. I will also tell you about my efforts to share our experience with as many people as possible and to urge our elected representatives to take action to make what happened to us a thing of the past.

At 3:30am on February 23, the day my wife and our five children were scheduled to return to Boston from a trip to Georgia, I was woken by a panicked phone call: “I’ve got the stomach flu. I’ve been throwing up for hours and I can barely walk. There’s no way I’m going to be able to fly today. I need you to change our flight.”

I immediately called US Airways and asked to move the tickets a day later. I was told that it would cost $1,250 ($750 in change fees and $100 per ticket because the new flight was more expensive under the arcane, incomprehensible, rigged pricing system your airline uses). This was well over half the original cost of the trip. Incredulously, I asked, “Surely you must have a policy for waiving the charge for changes due to sudden, serious, contagious illness?” No, I was informed, there is no such policy.

Thinking that perhaps I would have more success in person, I rushed to Logan airport and repeated my request at the US Airways ticket counter. The people there were unfailingly polite and tried their best to be helpful, but on one point they were unwavering: they could not waive the charges. I left the airport with nothing but a slip of paper showing how to contact your customer relations department, which was pretty much useless because it doesn’t open until 9:00am, by which time my wife would have had to leave for the airport, a two-hour drive from where she was staying.

I called my wife and listened to her sob hysterically as she realized that she was being forced to choose between risking her health and her children’s safety and spreading a dangerous virus, or spending a great deal of money we did not have to postpone her travel.

In fact, there was no choice, because her host, an experienced nurse who had been struck by the same virus herself a few days before, said that she couldn’t possibly fly in her condition and refused to drive her to the airport.

I proceeded to spend pretty much the entire day fighting the US Airways bureaucracy in an effort to get my wife’s tickets changed for less than $1,250. Let me tell you about that hellish experience.

The slip of paper I got at the airport had two telephone numbers on it. When I called the first number, 866-523-5333, a recording informed me that I should contact you through your Web site to receive a response within a few days, which of course was entirely useless for getting help with an urgent issue. Then I was hung up on.

When I called the second number, 480-693-6719, a recording said I had dialed an invalid extension. Yes, that’s right, one of the phone numbers given to me by US Airways employees at the airport was simply wrong.

I then wrote a letter summarizing our situation and sent it to the fax number on the slip of paper, 480-693-2305. I doubt it will surprise you to hear that no one ever responded to that letter.

After that, I decided to call back the first number again. I’m not sure why I thought I’d get a different result the second time, since there was nothing in the recording to suggest that. But it’s a good thing I did, because this time, rather than being told to go away, I was put into a queue, where I waited for almost two hours before being connected to a customer relations representative.

I told her my story, and once again, I was informed 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 had been nothing but polite to all of the US Airways employees with whom I had dealt.  I acknowledged, to each employee, that I understood that the airline’s policy was not under his/her control.  In each encounter, I politely asked if there was someone else to whom I could speak who might be able to override the policy.

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 a letter from a doctor that my wife was unable to fly this morning, they would waive the fees. She told me to fax the letter to 480-690-2300.

I got such a letter from the nurse who cared for my wife during her illness and refused to let her get on the plane. She went to a great deal of effort to produce the letter, since she had taken the day off to care for my wife and had to drive in to work to get hospital letterhead on which to write. But she got it, and she faxed it to me, and at around 3:00pm Eastern time, I started trying to fax it to US Airways.

I say “started trying” because, although I repeatedly tried faxing the letter to 480-690-2300 for five hours, I was never able to transmit it successfully. Most of my attempts before 7:00pm failed because the line was busy. A few attempts failed because there was no answer. And a very small number of attempts failed because the fax machine on the other end hung up in the middle of the first page of the fax.

Thinking that there might perhaps be a problem with my fax machine, I also made many attempts to send the fax from my company’s eFax account. These attempts also failed.

At around 4:00pm, I called your customer relations department again in a desperate attempt to find out what to do about the fact that I had been told to provide you with this letter but was unable to do so. I waited 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 to which I could send the letter that would be read quickly; there was no other fax machine to which I could send it; there was no way he could get in touch with the agent with whom I’d spoken before to make alternate arrangements.  That part of our exchange is so astounding that it bears repeating (emphasis added):

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.“

At 7:00pm when your customer relations department closed, the fax machine stopped answering completely. It is simply mind-boggling that a major international corporation would use a single fax machine attached to an actual telephone line for urgent incoming faxes, rather than an Internet-based service such as eFax with essentially unlimited capacity.

At this point, I had tried unsuccessfully all day to get my problem resolved through your customer relations department, and it became clear that for my wife and children to be able to come home the next day, I was just going to have to call your reservations number, change the tickets, pay whatever ransom you demanded, and then try after the fact to get some sort of refund.

Imagine my surprise when the reservations agent informed me that we were not going to be charged the $150 per ticket change fee because there was a notation on the reservation that the fee had been waived! Someone apparently decided at some point during the day to waive the fee despite never having seen the letter that had been demanded of us. Wouldn’t it have been nifty if whoever decided this had called to let me know, thus sparing me from several hours of wasted time, aggravation and panic? (Incidentally, my wife brought the letter to the airport with her the next day, but they didn’t want to see it there either.)

I was, however, still charged $100 per ticket because of the bogus difference in fares, for a total of $500 in ransom to get my family home from Georgia.

My wife’s experience on her trip home was equally frustrating. The check-in agent informed my wife that the agent who changed her tickets on Monday night did not reserve seats for her connecting flight, and for some reason he couldn’t do so either, so he couldn’t give her boarding passes and she was going to have to get them at the gate. This, despite the fact that there was only a 30-minute gap between the scheduled arrival time of the first flight and the departure time of the second, and it was unlikely that my wife would make it to the second flight with five kids even if everything went perfectly.

When my wife arrived in Charlotte, the people there were amazingly polite and helpful and bent over backwards to try to get her to her connecting flight before it left. I’m speaking about employees of the airport, not US Airways employees. These helpful people were hampered by receiving all sorts of contradictory information from US Airways – her connecting flight had already closed its doors, or it hadn’t. The flight had already left, or it hadn’t. The flight was going to leave on time, or it wasn’t. Every US airways employee seemed to have a different story. Because of all the contradictory information, my wife insisted that they bring her to the gate so that she and our children could try to board the flight.

When they got to the gate, lo and behold, the flight hadn’t left, and there were five seats open on it that my wife and children could take. They boarded the flight, and they arrived safely in Boston a few hours later.

There are so many things wrong with how we were treated by US Airways that I’m not even going to try to enumerate them all. If you can’t figure out from my narrative what your airline should have done differently, then your airline is truly beyond hope.

Now let me tell you about what I am doing to get out the message about your lousy airline.

• I have written about our experience extensively on my blog (http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/tag/trapped-in-georgia/) and will continue to do so.
• I have submitted my story to various consumer advocacy Web sites such as http://consumerist.com/ and will continue to submit it to additional sites.
• I am trying to get a guest Op-Ed column published in a prominent newspaper about the risk to public health and homeland security caused by your policy of forcing people to fly while ill by threatening to charge them exorbitant fees for changing their flights (an example column is attached).
• I will be sending letters to all of my federal elected representatives urging them to enact regulations requiring the airlines to allow sick passengers to change their flights without incurring a financial penalty.

I will do my best to ensure that the cost to your airline in lost business due to damage to your reputation far exceeds the $500 you forced me to pay to rescue my family.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

encl: Guest Op-Ed column submitted to the Boston Herald

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.