U.S. Airways: the good, the bad, and the unbelievable

(Follow the whole story at http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/tag/trapped-in-georgia/.)

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.