Not to all of it, mind you. I do still have the fresh memory of being thrown under the bus by American a few months back...but Southwest Airlines deserves a bit of friendly affection, in my humble opinion.
Amar surprised me for our 2nd anniversary and booked a trip to one of my favorite places in the world: Yosemite. Actually, we stayed a little South of the park, down in Mammoth Lakes, also beautiful! More on that, with pictures, later this week.
But back to the travel - we had to fly through Las Vegas and then to Reno to get there, and the first leg of the trip was pretty smooth. No delays, no crazy passengers, no missing bags. All in all, a good experience.
The return trip, however, was not as smooth. For some weather-related reasons, all of Las Vegas was shut down in regards to air travel. So our flight out of Reno was delayed, but we didn't know this until we boarded the plane.
Now, I'm not a super-frequent flyer, but I know that when the Captain comes out to make an announcement while you're still at the gate, something is up.
And something was indeed up.
He calmly, intelligently, rationally and compassionately explained to us that we would not be leaving anytime soon, and that we needed to deplane. On any other airline, they would have 1) just kept delaying the flight and refusing to tell you why, all while forcing you to stay seated in a grimy waiting area or 2) done something else equally awful.
Anyhow, they kindly asked us to head back out to the gate and to stay close, since we could literally need to board the plane at any moment.
About an hour later, while I was happily re-reading some Harry Potter (catching up on book 6 before the [now delayed!] movie comes out next year), when they asked us to line up again, based on the honor system (since they already had our boarding passes). We lined up, in order, and waited. We waited for about 5 minutes before they came back on the loud speaker to announce yet another delay.
About 30 minutes later, they came back on the PA system and said, "Folks, we've been cleared for takeoff. If you can board this plane in 15 minutes, we'll be good to go." And then it happened: that sense of camaraderie among the group. We banded together, boarded quickly (since we all had something at stake) and made it to the friendly skies over Las Vegas all in about 20 minutes.
Kudos, Southwest. You handled that well. At no point did I feel like a cow in a herd of nameless cattle. At no point were any of the flight attendants gruff or impatient with us, even when a rather large, rather tipsy many pointed at us and yelled "THEY TOOK MY SEAT"*. You kindly handed him his seat belt extender and asked him to find another seat. And you didn't even charge me for a blanket (take that, JetBlue!).
*It was on the honor system, buddy. If you had a business select number, but you chose to down another glass of wine rather than board with the business select folks, you missed your chance. The honor system was for boarding order only, not for seat saving. This is not the 4th grade, and I didn't hear anyone chanting "same seats, same places, same people, same faces" like we used to do in elementary school. So I hope you enjoyed your flight at the "back of the bus" as you like to call it. We certainly enjoyed ours at the front!
No comments:
Post a Comment