To be fair, I am on Continental Express, operated by ExpressJet. But unlike UA, who usually blames it "on the contract carrier," the CO staff have not tried to cast blame on others–at least not yet.
I’m sitting in the President’s Club right now in Terminal A at EWR, watching the departure monitor as my flight to SDF is now showing a 2155 departure (1hr, 55mins late).
The day has already been stressful. After completing my third final exam of the week, I trudged over to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station at 1740 for my 1755 Amtrak train to EWR. Continental has a codeshare agreement with Amtrak along the Northeast corridor and I had booked a ticket from ZFV to SDF via EWR. I slid my credit card in the Amtrak check-in machine and inputed my CO "flight number." My reservation came up, but it said it said my ticket was not paid for. I asked an attendant for some help and he said that I would have to wait in line to sort out the issue.
By now, it was 1750 and there were 30 people in the ticket line. Great…I tried my luck at a different kiosk, but got the same message. It wanted to charge me $46. I need to be in SDF tonight so I accepted the charge and out popped my ticket. This wasn’t a new ticket–it had my CO OnePass number on the boarding pass. If I find a $46 charge on my credit card bill, I will be disputing it.
After an arduous wait at security (I’m not used to waiting 15 minutes to get through…) I walked over to my gate just as boarding had begun. I settled in my seat, pulled out my newspaper, and sat back…and waited. Our 2000 departure time passed and someone from the flight deck, the First Officer apparently, announced that CO had "double booked" the captain and that he was on a flight to BUF! The FO assured us that CO was working on getting a back up in and assured us that we would be on our way shortly.
10 minutes later, though, he returned and announced that a back-up was on his way from RDU, but wouldn’t be arriving till 2130. So now we’re set to go at 2155.
Last week I received a status match to CO Platinum so this is my first trip with CO as one of their elites. Way to make a good impression, huh?
I do have to give props to CO for issuing everyone onboard a $12 meal voucher when they de-boarded us a few minutes ago. I think UNO Pizza is calling my name…
Hopefully I’ll be off to Lousivlle in an hour. If not, you’ll hear about it here.
Are you sure it’s CO who double-booked the crew? SDF is an Expressjet flight and they have their own ops folks, so likely it’s Expressjet who double-booked it.
Not to say it isn’t a pain, but there is a difference..
@Fozz: True ‘dat.
In fact I had already planned to update the post when I landed (which was unfortunately after you 0023 post time…)