Delta Airlines and the Trip From Hell

On Monday night we left for Canada. The flights were:

Monday   6/24
4.53 pm  Delta 7300 to LaGuardia  -- delayed due to weather
7.00 pm Delta 6217 to Montreal -- cancelled

Tuesday 6/25
8:40am Delta 6202 to Montreal -- delayed due to maintenance issue

Returning Wednesday   6/26
7.05am Delta 3907 to Detroit  -- delayed due to maintenance issue
10.20am Delta 3653 to Norfolk -- missed because 3907 was delayed

When we landed at LaGuardia, there was a theoretical possibility that our second flight might also have been delayed and we could still catch it. However, there were no gates available, so we (and other planes) sat on the taxiway for over an hour. It literally took us less time to fly from Norfolk to New York, than to get from the LaGuardia runway to the terminal. We would definitely have missed the second flight, if it hadn't been cancelled instead.

All the hotels around LaGuardia were full, so for dinner we went to a sports bar in the airport, where Josh said "I could microwave better burgers than these." Around 1am, the LaGuardia staff started setting out cots; they were under bright fluorescent lights but they were more comfortable than hard plastic chairs and, unlike Philadelphia's airport, they didn't have an ad blaring every ten minutes on why the city is so great and you should really spend a lot of money there. Josh still didn't get any sleep, but I managed a couple of hours.

Sleeping in the airport and waking up at 5am made it easy to catch our 8:40am flight, which left the gate on time, made it almost to the runway, and then went back to a maintenance area. The crew told us that they didn't know how long it would take, and they might be putting us on a shuttle to go back to the terminal. It was looking like we might miss Mum's funeral entirely, and I was considering just chucking the trip and going back to Virginia Beach. But, an hour late, we got airborne, and landed at Montreal at 11:30. Josh and I had our suits with us, so we decided to forego picking up our checked luggage; we raced through the airport, found the Customs and Immigration hall miraculously empty and blitzed through, and got a cab directly to the church, arriving about 12:10, just before the limo with the rest of the family arrived. We had just enough time before the service to find a washroom and change into our suits, before taking our places.

The next morning, we got up at 4am and headed to the airport at 5:00 to catch the 7.05 flight. Needless to say, that one was delayed also. A passenger seat had been broken the night before, and the clean up crew hadn't fixed or reported it. The flight left about an hour late, long enough to make us miss our 10:20 flight and leave us sitting in Detroit until 2:10. Delta gave us $6 meal vouchers, which isn't enough to buy a meal in an airport; but at least the Detroit airport has free WiFi, unlike LAX or LaGuardia. Instead of getting home at noon as we should have--which would have let Josh get to work at his usual 1pm--we landed a little after 4pm and made it home at 5:15.

I wrote a letter to Delta to say: "The front line people were almost all at least okay, some were good, some went above and beyond. They just weren't the people responsible for getting the planes from A to B on time. "Getting from A to B" is the reason for spending $1500 on a pair of plane tickets in the first place. So, you were polite while completely failing in the whole point of your business.