Northwest Needs Some Help

So, Thanksgiving weekend. Flying to Detroit to visit some friends and Alicia's family. 39 million travelers doing the same. What were we thinking?

So our flight from BOS - DTW was scheduled to leave at 7 pm on Thanksgiving Eve. We arrived around 3 pm to be there well in advance of all the crowds. Good plan but where were the people? We checked in and were through security in roughly 30 minutes. Now just 3+ hours to sit and wait for our flight. Around 6 o'clock there was an announcement that our flight would be delayed for an hour and that the new flight time is 8 pm. Okay, no problem. Just getting tired of sitting around the airport. Good thing I brought some homework and a good book. So at 7:45 the plane finally touches down and we are told that we are all going to have to board the plane by 8:25 with the doors closed so that we can "legally" take-off due to the fatigue rules for the pilots. So at 8:15 they start boarding the plane. At 8:30 Alicia and I still have not boarded the plane due to issues with the ticket checkers. At 8:45 the plane is boarded and ready to go. At 8:46 pm the captain gets on the intercom announcing that the flight is canceled due to the legality issues.
What a mess!?! They tell us on the plane that we all need to disembark and retrieve our luggage from the carousels and that we would be put up in the Airport Hilton for the night and that we would need to be back around 6 am the next morning as the flight would leave around 6:30 am but that they would leave "when the last passenger arrives." So, we all disembark and move to the carousels to get our luggage. A couple of irate customers go to "talk" to the customer service reps who say that we won't be able to retrieve our bags as they will stay on the plane overnight. Another round of irate customers go and "talk" to the reps and then another announcement is made that we will in fact be able to get our luggage. So after waiting another 10 minutes we get our bags and walk over to the Hotel where there is a line of roughly 100 people waiting to get their hotel room for the night. Talk about the late-night crunch: 160 frustrated passengers hitting the counter at 10 pm with two or three staff...that will stretch your capabilities. Alicia and I took one look at the line and went to the hotel bar to have a bite to eat and a much needed beer. After we headed in, roughly 50 more Northwest customers decided that that was the right place to be and joined us. So let me just say that watching the bar staff deal with the onslaught of people was much more impressive than both Northwest and Hilton staffs. There was no miscommunication just pure performance. Waiters/managers/kitchen staff all kicked in to help support the 50 new customers. It was pretty impressive to me that a hotel bar could deal with such a huge rush of customers where as the Hotel and the Airline didn't. I know that some of you out there are thinking that only 50 people to deal with shouldn't be that hard and that the airline and hotel had to deal with many more, but I'm willing to argue that the 50 people addition to the bar was a much bigger group to deal with compared to the average number of people that the hotel and airline have to deal with both on a daily basis as well as in the shock occurrence.

To make matters worse, on our flight back, we were delayed for the length of our flight (i.e. - we were still sitting on the tarmac when our flight should have arrived at Boston) while we waited for deicing (note that our plane was the only one that waited that long as they had to reload both deicers while they were deicing our plane...in doing so they actually had to deice the plane twice!). To make matters worse, every 20 minutes the co-pilot would get on the intercom and tell us that we would be "on our way in 5 minutes." Talk about frustrating the customers! I think that Northwest lost a lot of future customers on these two flights (more the first than the second).

Just relating this experience to school, I find that you can observe and learn observe many things from completely unrelated fields and apply them. A good example of this is demonstrated in Freakonomics, a great book that I just finished on the plane ride - thanks Northwest!

Hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving!
More later...