Can it be any worse?

I took a flight from New York City to Seattle this week. The unexpected turn of events made me realize the importance of customer service yet again.

To start with, the Delta airlines flight took eleven hours to reach Seattle. Yes, we spent eleven hours sitting in the plane…normally it is between six to seven hours. Out of these eleven hours, four hours were spent standing and taxing at the JFK airport, during which the air conditioner was turned-off and turned-on (on passengers’ request) a few times. 

As you might know, Delta like many other airlines do not serve food in the main cabin, they sell it. As per their estimates of how many passengers normally buy food in a six hour flight, they have food for a some percentage of the attendance. So despite of standing at the door for about a couple of hours with 200 passengers in the plane, they did not take the pain of revising these estimates. Result being about half of the passengers asked to spend eleven hours on peanuts (they are complimentary!)

Well you can say, it was all circumstantial and no big deal (seriously, four hours more in a plane and no food for eleven hours is not that big of a deal). But to top it all off, there was a team of unapologetic crew. The crew right from the captain to the flight attendants acted very casually about the delay and food shortage without apologizing even once during the entire thing. The flight captain was quick to blame the delays on the JFK staff and flight attendants pointed to their estimates for shortage of food.

The simple thing that they did not get is that the customer sitting in the plane had an expectation from them, not from the JFK staff and certainly not from some guess work of how many people will be hungry. The easy thing would have been to not board the flight knowing that you are going to stand at the gate for two hours. Yet easier, load the plane with enough food after learning that the flight is going to take at least ten hours to reach the destination. and easiest of all, say the passengers who “paid” to travel with them “sorry” about the mess.

The purpose of this post is not to do Delta bashing over the bad experience I had, but I am pretty sure, or let me say I hope, that the customer service they provided their passengers here could not have been any worse.