I suppose it’s time to report on day 4 of Washington.
It was the worst of our days, and a very long day at that. Our flight was scheduled to leave from Yakima at 6:45am, and we were supposed to eventually arrive in Birmingham at 2pm on the same day. We arrived at the airport at about 6:10, with no one at the desk so we had to go straight through security to try to check Clint’s bag since we had to check it on the trip to Washington due to it’s size.
We finally make it through security only to have them tell us they won’t allow his bag on due to size and contents and refused to check it. We figure we can try to catch a later flight, and opt to wait.
Due to the size of the airport however, there was only 2 Delta flights (both going to Salt Lake) with about 4-5 Horizon flights going to Seattle. Also, according to the employees at the airport there were no actual Delta employees working there to talk to, so we had to make multiple phone calls to Delta customer service to attempt to get our issue resolved. After hours of arguing with Delta, and just attempting to get out of Yakima, we finally were able to get a flight out of Seattle — which so happened to be 3 hours away.
So we had to take an airport shuttle to Seattle, arriving there at about 2pm. Our flight left at 12:30am, so we had a pretty long wait ahead. We were not allowed to even check in until 6 hours before our flight, so we had to wait outside security just hanging out until we could actually check in.
At this point as well, we had no money and were tired and hungry, but managed to luck out. In one of our few trips to the Delta desk I noticed a blackberry cellphone sitting there that someone seemingly left behind. After a few phone calls to the guy’s wife, we luckily were able to run into him and catch him before his plane left. He gave us $20 for our trouble which allowed us to actually eat dinner.
So basically we spent about 10 hours in the SEA-TAC terminal, another 6 or so hours on the plane before we were able to actually arrive in Atlanta, and then another 45 minute flight arriving in Birmingham at 9am over 24 hours after our original flight was supposed to leave Yakima.
This experience has left me severely unsatisfied with Delta’s customer service. They were supposed to offer and allow our baggage to be sent via a later flight, which they did not. We attempted to get them to do so, only to have them reply that we would lose all of our baggage. We tried to get on a standby list for any number of flights leaving Seattle, which several Delta customer service representatives claimed they don’t do standby. Of course, we found out they were lying when the desk was calling standby passengers as our flight was leaving at 12:30am. We kept getting mixed results from Delta having them tell us multiple things many of which conflicted with each other.
In short, it was a long trip and we were just glad to be back…