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July 30, 2007

Northwest Airlines

Northwest Airlines clearly prescribes to the idea "since everyone knows customer services is measured in shades of bad, why even try to be good?"

This weekend, Kat, Miles, and I flew out to Indianapolis on Northwest Airlines (when you've got an 11-month-old, direct flights are a necessity, so our choices were limited).  The flight out was fairly ok:  we printed our boarding passes ahead of time, saw that we had assigned seats...everything was hunky-dory.

Midway through our trip, we decided to check our seat assignments on our flight home.  According to Northwest's website, the flight was completely (if not over-) booked yet we had no seat assignments...which, of course, seemed bad.  I spent the next hour (or so...it seemed) trying to get in touch with someone at Northwest to sort this out.  I called their 800# and was of course routed to some maddening automated system which is obviously designed to connect you to no one.  Even if you try to just repeat the word "agent" "agent" "agent" over and over...the phone system says "Ok!  It sounds like you want to talk to an agent!  First I need you to give me some simple information to make things go quicker."  That "simple information" is a 10-minute series of frustrating questions. 

And then, after all that, I get a "due to heavy call volume, we cannot complete this call" and a hang-up.

I tried an end-run by trying to contact someone for "new reservations" (thinking that they'd be more willing to drum up new business than deal with money they already had)...which was fine until I was told there would be a "30-minute or longer" wait to talk to an agent.

A third try with "existing reservations" got me a confirmation that we didn't have seats for our return flight, and would we like to secure seats now?  "Yes."  "Due to heavy call volume, we cannot complete this call," annnnnd hang-up.

A fourth try resulted in "Our system is experiencing problems.  Good bye."

Some other awesome attributes of this technological marvel:

• Someone coughing in the background registers as an answer (in one case, we apparently were looking for a flight in *cough cough* September...once the wrong information is registered, you get to start all over to fix it!)
• If you miss a prompt (as I did rifling through papers to find a flight number), the system doesn't repeat the question...instead, all I get is "Please say 'Yes' or 'No.'"  "Please say 'Yes' or 'No.'"  (Umm, "yes?"  "Thank you for choosing lavatory seating")
• Like a bad web form with no validation, the system chokes if you give it input in an improperly-formatted manner.  For instance, instead of saying "July 30th" as our flight date, I (hurriedly) said "the 30th" which translated to "May 15th."  Another time, I (stupidly) said "Monday," which translated to "May 1st."   Not even noting how awesome it is that the system assumed I would be interested in flight information for a flight 2-months in the past.
  

So I gave up, stressing out that we'd get Miles to the airport at 7am on Monday only to find that we don't have seats.  We tried calling again at around 8am on Sunday...

...and the agent we eventually spoke to told us that we had seats assigned to us all along.

Not related to this particular (probably pervasive) annoyance, I just saw this pop up at the Consumerist: "Travel Tip - Avoid Northwest Airlines at End of Month."  We did, however, noticed that Northwest gate agents were playing scarce up to 15-minutes prior to boarding (at Logan).

Clampants | July 30, 2007 01:07 PM