(August 2007, hell at the Ft. Lauderdale airport.)
You’d think spending five hours at Laguardia in February, waiting for my ultra-delayed flight to Haiti would’ve been enough. Or when the stewardess tried to forcibly gate-check my bag to the Port-au-Prince airport while I screamed profanities at her from my seat. Or when they canceled my flight from Fort Lauderdale to Laguardia last summer and I spent three hours at the gate and another three waiting to rebook and get a hotel room. But hey- I’m a glutton for punishment.
In the cab on the way to Laguardia Friday, I received this spelling error-laden email on my Blackberry:
“We would like to inform you that your flight for today April 4, 2008, NK601 / LGA-FLL has been cancelled. Plese call us back at the reservation department at 1-800-772-7117 to confirm and to discuss your options. Spirit Airlines will be reaccommodating passengers to the next available flight. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for choosing Spirit Airlines.”
Yeah, they had no flights available that day. I looked at sidestep.com, found a cheap flight from JFK to West Palm, and told the cab driver to head towards the Van Wyck. Pain in the ass. Sunday night, I spent literally three hours on the phone with the Spirit Airlines call center (shockingly, based in INDIA), waiting for the representative to get an American supervisor on the line so he could reissue my ticket.
It was funny, in the way horribly inconvenient and annoying situations usually are. The hold music was a continuous loop of Spirit ads and generic steel drum music. At one point, I begged the representative to leave the music off when he put me back on hold. “You want silence?” he asked. He came back a few seconds later and informed me that it was impossible for him to place me on hold without the music. “You cannot have silence,” he said.
At the end of the excruciating phone call, the representative told me I had $20 left on my voucher and started to rattle off a number for me to write down so I could use it in the future. “No.” I said. “Just stop. It is my solemn promise that I will never fly you again. Never. Burn the voucher. Burn it.”
Never, ever again.
Tags: delay, fort lauderdale, greyhound of the sky, Haiti, hell on earth, laguardia, nyc, spirit airlines, third world
