I AM...
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Continental Airlines Failed Me
3/17/2007 07:34:00 AM
So as some of you know already, my flight to Houston was canceled last night. I spent the night in a hotel despite the fact that it was not paid for by the airlines. Now as most people know, airlines will pay for your hotel if they cancel a flight unless it is canceled due to weather. But what does it actually mean to be canceled due to weather? Obviously if there were huge storms in an area and the flight can't take off this would be considered weather related. Also there might be bad weather in the place that you are flying to, resulting in the flight to be canceled. But neither of these are my case; there were clear skies in OKC and in Houston except that they still say it was canceled due to weather. Maybe I could understand if it was canceled because the plane coming in for us was stuck some place due to bad weather there. But again, not my case.My case: There is a plane parked at the gate (even the correct plane) and a fully functional plane at that. It is 20 minutes or so after we were supposed to depart; but never the less, we did have a plane and things were looking good. Until they tell us that the flight has been canceled due to weather. Evidently the crew that was supposed to fly us got delayed some place due to bad weather resulting in them having too many hours of air time and thus canceling my flight.
So I began to think about this, the pilots couldn't have been that affected by weather, after all they were pretty close to landing on time in OKC. Also, do the airlines usually cut it this close for pilot air time? In most business you plan for the worst and strive for the best. This is so that if something does go wrong you will be prepared to either fix it immediately or not even see any issue in the consumers mind. You would have to assume that from time to time pilots do get delayed and have to circle and such, but this should be planed for. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they were in the air for too long, Continental Airlines had time to figure out how to get a new crew to the airport; around noon they posted that my flight was going to be delayed and my flight was scheduled for 6 and a half hours later. Why wouldn't they do this? In my mind it was because of how small the plane was and they just didn't care about that few of people.
Let’s go in a new direction now, is there anything that they can't blame on weather? The plane is broken due to some excessive turbulence in its last flight. Turbulence is a part of weather so clearly the flight is canceled due to weather, right? There are numerous more examples that could be filled in here. But the point is, is there anything that they can't blame on weather?
In my opinion the flight was not canceled due to weather, it was canceled due to lack of planning and customer care from Continental Airlines.
Just as a side note: A group of 5 were able to get their itinerary completely refunded and decided to drive to Houston. A couple might be having to miss out on a all inclusive vacation of a life time because their first flight being canceled causes them to miss the rest of the series of their flights and lay-overs. And one girl was scared out of her mind because she was flying without her mother and didn't know what to do.
Now just to give Continental Airlines one thing, they were kind enough to make a new flight for us in the morning. And they were able to change my flight from Houston to Arizona to a later time to accommodate for the time of the flight this morning.
Labels: Airlines, Canceled, Continental, Delayed, Flights, hotel, weather
2 comments2 Comments:
This post has been removed by the author.By
Kellen Butler, at
March 17, 2007 7:58 AM
Good post.
By
Noya, at
October 28, 2008 12:02 PM
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