I just got back from a weekend wedding trip to Figure 8 Island in North Carolina (a pretty amazing place that I would like to visit again) and noticed a conversation on the flight out of Charlotte yesterday that I thought I would share with you. Somehow a woman got onto the plane with a boarding pass for a seat that had already been issued to someone else. I am really not sure how this happened in the first place as there was a man scanning the boarding passes and entering the seat number manually as we boarded the plane (not sure why the sanning did not do this automatically). The woman, who had apparently booked the seat months ago, based on what she was saying) went to a flight attendant and told her about the fact that there was someone in her seat with a valid boarding pass for that seat as well. The flight attendant told the woman to just wait until everyone had taken their seats on the plane and they would then deal with her issue. In amazement, the woman looked at the flight attendant and told her that she better not get bumped off of the flight as she had booked and paid for this flight months ago. Here is where I was surprised to hear what the flight attendant said. The attendant told the woman that there is no reason for her to get upset. Hmmm. I was thinking that there is every reason for her to get upset and it seemed the more the flight attendant said to her, the more she had a right to get upset.

If I were the woman I would have liked/expected the flight attendant to check my boarding pass for validity and if it were valid, to check the validity of the other boarding pass in question…immediately. Telling the woman she has nothing to get upset about when she is clearly in jeopardy (did I mention just about every US Airways flight out of Charlotte seemed to be overbooked) of getting bumped from a flight that is 2,500 miles away from her home, is just plain dumb.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Help Desk News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.