Re: Rep Retirement Lodge 127: So This is the New Year...
"Delta Airlines and TSA can blow me" story:
Our flight to Vegas was at 9AM on Dec. 30th. We got to MSP at 7:15, 1:45 before takeoff, and the time that was recommended on the email Delta sent me. We checked in the night before, so we just had to drop bags, we go to the much shorter "bag drop" line, where some Delta ***** doesn't let us get in line because we don't have a paper boarding pass, we had them sent to our phones, but apparently she couldn't figure that out. Since we didn't have a paper boarding pass she made us go to the check in line, which took about a half an hour to get through, as opposed to about 10 minutes if we would have been where we were supposed to be. We went straight to security, where the line was enormous, and TSA would only open 1 line, even though there were about 5 TSA people just standing around BSing and not working. It took an hour to get through security. Now we only have 15 minutes until takeoff. The gate wasn't too far away, we ran there. When we got there, the door was still open, but they told us that the flight was overbooked, and even though we had reserved seats, and were checked in, they gave away our seats. Complete ****ing bull****.
We sat standby for the next flight to Vegas, and were the 2 highest on the list for standby. This time they held the flight 10 minutes after it was supposed to take off so people that were checked in could get there. Absolute opposite of what happened to us for the first flight. We got on standby for the next flight, and got bumped down to about 10th in priority. At this point we got ****ed and finally found a Delta employee that would listen to us. This guy was awesome, he got us hooked up with a flight into Salt Lake City, through Denver, and a rental car from there. Still very ****ty, but at least we were getting out of MSP. Get into Denver at about 3:30 to find that our flight to Salt Lake City was delayed. We walked to the Frontier help desk, to see if they had anything into Vegas, they were helpful, but didn't have anything open. Get back to our gate, and the flight is delayed another hour. We notice that there is a Southwest flight to Vegas right across the terminal from us, so we check with the gate attendant to see if we could get on it. They had 1 seat left. I bought it right away, for $250. My buddy was going to get the last seat left on the next flight, also for $250. Then the gate attendant says "you can both go on this flight, I was supposed to be on it, but I'll give you my seat". ****ing awesome. Of course this flight is delayed too, then we spent literally an hour and a half getting de-iced. But we ended up getting into Vegas at about 10:00PM local time. Also, Southwest gave everyone 2 free drinks, I've never seen so much liquor drank on an airplane.