As We Expected

M tried to get her ticket changed last night. We tried again today, before she checked in. Chicago, Toronto, and SJ are all suffering from winter weather, snowstorms, and plenty of delays. However, United and Air Canada simply wouldn't listen and could not go the extra mile to rebook her for sometime a little later.

This is funny to me, as they allowed her to fly into Chicago and then are leaving her possibly stranded there because this leg of the flight was clear. So, rather than dealing with the rebooking last night, or doing it this morning, they have now added her to the even longer list of people they must accommodate tonight and tomorrow.

M is hoping to be on an American flight from Chicago to Montreal, where she can hopefully hook up with her brother and stay with someone she knows. However, when she called me and had me check, the American flight was already an hour delayed due to weather and it didn't look good that she would be going to Montreal, either.

So, because the airlines are allowed to run their business in a slipshod, perfunctory, and unsatisfactory manner, she may be stuck in Chicago, left to buy her own hotel room, left to fly standby and deal with the hassle of rebooking everything tomorrow. She will miss out on at least one full day of work which, had they allowed her to rebook for Thursday, Friday, or the weekend from here, she could have made up working from my home while I went in to work.

The American government has bailed out the airlines a number of times. And most of those times it was because the airlines run their businesses in such shoddy and haphazard a manner that they couldn't remain solvent, couldn't pay their employees, and had to be bailed out.

I think we are rapidly running into a state where they will need to be bailed out again. Until we make these people treat the cargo they freight across the world as human beings, we will not get the service, respect, or treatment we deserve. Yes, so that may mean that airline tickets go up, possibly significantly, in price. I think that is a good thing; those who need to travel will still have to travel. But when we do, we will be treated like we should be and rerouted, accounted for, and helped to our destination rather than stuck, stranded, alone and friendless, in some god-forbidden place not of our choosing and forced to shell out loads more money that we may not have or cannot afford to spend on our own survival for something that is not our fault.

We need to start considering holding the airlines as responsible for the contracted job they do as we do any other contracted service.