Over the weekend, I came across two articles which were focused on customer service in the airline industry.  As you probably would’ve guessed, the results were not good.

The first article comes from the New York Daily News in wake of the blizzard that hampered the northeast portion of the country last week and over the weekend. Travelers at New York’s JFK airport were met with delays, equipment malfunctions, and (as predicted) horrendous customer service experiences.

“We’ve been here since 8 a.m., and our flight keeps getting pushed back,” Leah Golubchick told the Daily News Saturday. “At first they said the baggage machine was frozen, so they were unable to take the bags off the plane. Now they said that the plane is snowed in at the hangar!”

“How is 6 inches of snow enough to block a hangar?” the 31-year-old Brooklyn resident asked. “The flight crew and pilots are all here. They’ve been joking about grabbing shovels to help dig the plane out.”

Leah, you are absolutely right. This is New York, not Miami. Snow falls during the winter months…every year.

Golubchick’s travel problems began Thursday, when the storm forced her original Delta Airlines flight to Denver to be cancelled.  She was ultimately put on Saturday’s flight — but the plane didn’t budge. 

“They’re not even announcing the delays anymore,” she said. “They’re just putting it up on the screen.”

Kenneth Watson, an Army vet and graduate student from St. Cloud, Minn., showed up early for his 10:30 a.m. Sun Country Airlines flight to Minneapolis. He left the airport seven hours later — but he wasn’t flying.

“I checked the board and it said it was going to be delayed, and then it was just canceled,” Watson, 38, said. “No one told us anything. There was so much chaos. There were probably tens of thousands of people.  It was like I was in a basketball arena.”

That’s nice. Let’s crowd the hallways with passengers looking for their flight status instead of simply continuing to announce delays. Makes sense. Can you say Misuse of Technology?