So Much for That Voucher

ATA Airlines Shuts Down After Filing for Bankruptcy Protection

Based on their inability to get me to Kona on March 17th, I think have an insight into why they've utterly failed.

I arrived in Oakland at 4 PM (from LAX) with a little time to kill before my scheduled 6:15 flight to Kona, so I wandered around a bit before going to the gate and asking to be put in an exit row, whereupon I learned that the flight was delayed until 10 PM. Six hours in the Oakland airport! What fun. I read a couple books (the Warriors series, borrowed from my little sister -- they're good enough that I've started on the next 6-book series) and then started looking around to see if one of the shops would sell me a Nintendo DS or something. None were available, which seems stupid, since I was prepared to buy one, and I'm not nearly as impulsive as most other people.

Anyway, I walked around the airport 500 times, got my $10 food voucher from the airline, and waited with mounting anticipation as our boarding time approached. And then, another delay. Until 11 PM. That's when I started to fear that we were on the Road of One Thousand Successive Delays Leading Inexorably to Cancellation (which is also, incidentally, the name of a really great Mah Jongg hand).

Sure enough, at eleven, we were pushed back to midnight, and then to 2 AM. As you can imagine, the natives were getting pretty restless by now, with several macho a-holes hovering around the gate agent and helpfully reminding her every five seconds that they were paying customers who really really wanted to get on an airplane. My blood pressure goes up just thinking about these people. SHUT UP STUPID PEOPLE. I would like to put a couple swear words in there, but this is a family blog. Anyway, I put a shirt over my face and tried to get a little shut-eye before, you know, the flight was cancelled. Which it finally was, at 2:30, because a flight attendant had called in sick and they couldn't fly without a full crew.

Cue the seething mob! I am proud to say that I was second in line, by which I mean that there was a mosh pit around the podium with a nice orderly line forming behind it, and I was second in the nice orderly line. Everyone could feel the waves of righteousness coming off of me, I'm sure.

OK, we all know this story, right? We've all been to the airport (except one of my relatives, but I don't want to embarrass my dad by naming him specifically), we've all had flights get cancelled and been surrounded by morons who think the gate agent is in charge of scheduling and plane maintenance and who lives and who dies. So it's not like this is some kind of unique tale so far. But I haven't gotten to the good part.

Normally, at this point, everyone gets put on different flights. ATA's Kona flights were booked for the next 10 days, so we were all going to have to be booked with some other airline(s) to get there. Not unusual. I don't know how they usually deal with this process -- usually the gate agent works his/her magic, occasionally saying things to placate the masses, and then gives out everyone's new flight info, and that's that. It might take a little while, but it doesn't seem complicated. They have procedures for these things.

I'm trying to give the gate agent the benefit of the doubt here and say that it's ATA's fault she had to do things this way, but it might just have been poor training and the fact that no one else who knows anything is working at 2:30 AM. In any case, the agent got on the phone, and this is roughly what I heard of her side of the conversation.

I need to book some passengers on a flight to Kona. How much room do you have in coach?

I have 160 people.

One hundred and sixty.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY.

ATA.

A - T - A.

Can I talk to your supervisor?

[More discussion of how many people she was trying to book]

There's no credit card. I'm rebooking passengers from ATA.

A - T - A.

One at a time...? There are ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY PEOPLE.

From all this, I was starting to get the impression that she had called United's reservations line. I'm not sure how airlines usually rebook passengers on other airlines, but... I'm pretty sure they don't do it THAT way. Eventually, she managed to straighten a couple things out, and started rebooking us in groups of nine. She did this by taking each person's boarding pass, reading his/her name into the phone, spelling it, spelling it again, spelling it again, acknowledging to the person on the phone that the passenger did indeed have an unusual name, reading a confirmation number, and reading it again. Needless to say, this meant that it was taking well over a minute to rebook each person, and only one agent was working on this. You do the math.

This was making the natives EXTREMELY restless, to the point where they called in six actual police officers to stand by the podium. No one was being violent, but it did seem prudent. Since the mosh pit refused to be assimilated into the orderly line, it was quite a long time before the agent even got to the line. The righteous line-people were remarkably patient, although the lady at the very end did lose it at one point and rush the podium, demanding to know why she had to be last. Well... hate to say it, since no one wants to be last... but someone has to be last. Some amount of glaring from the line-people seemed to communicate this to her.

Things did speed up, and I had my new booking after about an hour -- for a United flight leaving at 8:40 AM from SFO. They were giving out vouchers for a hotel and a cab ride. The cab voucher was essentially a blank check to get us out of Oakland, and they had announced that the hotel voucher was for the Crowne Plaza near SFO. I decided that the hotel was pointless, since it would pretty much just get me a shower and a 1-hour nap before I had to get to the airport again, so I went straight to SFO (an $80 fare). There were plenty of people who sounded interested in the hotel option, so off they went to the Crowne Plaza. Thanks, ATA!

Except.... the vouchers weren't for the Crowne Plaza. They were for a Best Western, which you would only know if you happened to call the phone number on the voucher. I groan in sympathy for all the people who did not call the number and arrived at the CP to find blank stares and no available rooms.

As for those of us who went straight to SFO, we were greeted by a phalanx of United agents who were waiting just for us. They were so fast! And nice! And I was assigned a seat in Economy Plus! And.... once I got to the gate.... they had those seats that are arranged in sets of four with NO ARMRESTS between them. Only people who have been awake for 38 hours can truly appreciate those seats. And we did, my friends. It looked like a hobo camp at that gate.

So, in the end, we all made to Kona on a real airline, each with a voucher for a free round-trip domestic or international ATA flight. What a nice gesture. I've already redeemed it by folding it into a paper airplane and flying it across the backyard! Thanks, ATA!