Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, i.e the cell phone, this week during the Northeast snowstorm I got to experience live, if second-hand, what happens when airline check-in personnel and gate agents aren’t up to their jobs. Our esteemed publisher Fran Gallagher has written about this quite a few times.

My daughter, Jessica, had an AirTran flight on Thursday out of Newburgh, N.Y. (SWF) nonstop to Tampa (TPA) to come visit me for the holidays. Of course, Thursday was the day the big snowstorm hit. Her flight was due to depart at 12:21, but with the storm supposed to move in by 10, she left home at 8 a.m. for the less-than-one-hour drive. However, the storm moved in early, and at 11 a.m. I got a tearful call; she was sitting at a dead stop in traffic, 4 miles from the airport exit, and hadn’t moved in almost two hours. Lots of accidents. We stayed on the phone as I checked to see the flight was still on, and still on time–AirTran will take off early if it feels the need–and discussed her options. I told her to park in the closest-in spot and damned the expense, if she got there; I checked the next day’s flights and saw there were still plenty of open seats; and I found a nice hotel with a restaurant, bar, room service and courtesy airport transportation.

Of course, the traffic opened up. The next call I got was at 11:45. She’d parked in the first lot she came to; the airport was totally unplowed. Dragging her wheeled luggage (and a lot of snow) she got to the terminal at 10 to 12. And then the narrowminded, by-the-book, unable-to-think-outside the box desk personnel came into play. My daughter and several other passengers were told that they had missed the deadline for checking baggage and would have to abandon their luggage if they wanted to get on the plane; I was listening–via another upset phone call–as various nonsensical answers were given. Can I take the luggage back to my car? No, you don’t have time. Will you put it on a later flight? No. Will you hold in kept baggage? No, it’s your problem, you were late. But it’s snowing and there were accidents! (This from a chorus of, now, about 10 passengers.) That’s not our fault. Can we see a supervisor? No, the supervisor is busy with the plane.

I made some suggestions and she asked more questions: Can I transfer the contents of my suitcase into some smaller bags? No, you can only have one carry-on. How can I just abandon my suitcase, won’t that trigger the bomb squad or something? Oh, I guess you can’t do that. Will you confirm me for a flight tomorrow? No, we can only let you change your ticket to standby (keep in mind that online I could see that they still had open seats in six different fare categories). By now there were 15 passengers with luggage complaining. And then a man’s voice; my daughter said the supervisor had arrived, she’d call back.

The supervisor assessed the situation and told all 15 passengers to take their luggage with them to the plane. When they arrived, there was another small glitch–the plane staff hadn’t gotten the message and told them they couldn’t have the luggage. But then the supervisor contacted them, and the luggage was taken–with no baggage tags–to the hold. By the next call, she was onboard, at 12:10.

Then the plane was delayed for deicing, and then the pilots didn’t like the condition of the ice on the wings when they got to the runway–more power to them, so they went back again. Got deiced again, by a single truck, rolled out again, still didn’t like the way one wing looked, went back again. Used two trucks simultaneously. The plane finally took off at 3:10.

From there, it was a piece of cake. According to my daughter the flight went smoothly and the flight personnel were pleasant. My concern was now that the untagged luggage would somehow get lost in the bowels of Tampa Airport. But I got a timely call while I was waiting in the cell phone lot; her luggage was the first off the plane.

All told, given a major snowstorm that cancelled a lot of flights, the fact that she arrived safely only three hours late is a minor miracle in itself. But the airlines were supposed to have learned a lesson from all last winter’s disasters in terms of how to handle passenger frustrations, and you certainly couldn’t prove that by the AirTran desk staff. Sure they have a rulebook, but somebody needs to teach them how to show some consideration for their passengers. In this case they ultimately bent the rules, but even having a plan to pleasantly convey how the late-arriving passengers could either forward or store their luggage would have meant good will, instead of the considerable ill will created by rude,uncaring people who basically just said, “It’s not my problem.”

–Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer