First off, I want to wish everybody a Happy New Year.
I rung in the New Year in Prague and had a fabulous time doing so. I have written a long entry about it, but on my laptop, so it must wait until I connect the laptop to the Internet.
Unfortunately, my bag is not yet with me. It seems that KLM canceled yesterday afternoon’s flight from Amsterdam to Prague thus dooming my bag’s timely arrival. I am hoping that it gets here within the hour.
I’ve been pondering the situtation a bit, and have the following to report: Northwest has now lost my bags twice. The first time was on a DEN-DTW-IND trip and was understandable. There was a horrible snow storm in Detroit and I had something like 5 minutes to make my connection. I never expected my bag to make it. The suitcase was delivered that evening. I suspect this time NWA lost the bag in Detroit–hence I am blaming NWA.
KLM has misplaced my bags on US to Amsterdam flights three times. Twice the bags were located within an hour at the airport, and once they delivered the bags to my friend’s apartment before midnight the same day.
United Airlines, and its affiliates, misplaced my bags once–thus causing Singapore Airlines to have its agents in Frankfurt humbly apologize. The bag was returned two days later to me in Weimar. I forget why it took two days now, but it did show up at my apartment the evening of the second day.
There you have it: my life’s history of lost bags. NWA and KLM don’t look so good, but one must remember that I haven’t flown non NWA airlines very often–so in fact United has the worst record for me, personally.
That doesn’t change the fact that I am a little annoyed with KLM right now. Canceling yesterday afternoon’s Prague flight was probably due to low load factors, not for a legitimate reason–and I’m not happy.
Adam–
Yes, an airline will cancel a flight if the load factor is going to be low on the route that day and they have multiple flights. Though it seems odd that they would cancel a single daily flight if that is all there is. On the multiples I’d have to ask you if you would pay the insane amounts of money just to move a plane if you had to make the decision?
On the same line… The customer service reps at United Airlines are deplorable. They kept telling me they were not responsible for the weather (true) but I kept reminding them they were responsible for having flown the aircraft into a blizzard. I further told them to quit lying to me about the whole debacle and just admit that the only reason the plane left California is that they wanted in position at Dulles in Washington, DC so that they would have a plane to send out west when the airport opened the next day.
Take that surly customer service rep! Don’t F**k with a guy that works with your internal data on a daily basis.
Of course, that didn’t change the fact that I was still stuck in DC, but it made me feel better. 🙂
Chris, I did some casual investigation. There are 5 flights a day between Amsterdam and Prague. 3x Czech Airlines, 1x KLM Mainline, 1x KLM Cityhopper.
I flew the KLM Mainline flight, my bag was supposed to be on the KLM Cityhopper — which, in fact, was never scheduled to fly on December 31st — so it wasn’t cancelled due to a low load factor, it just never existed–hence the agent lied to me when she said it would be on that flight.
Strangely, there never appeared to be an effort to put my bag on a Czech Airlines flight — Odd considering that Czech Airlines is a KLM / SkyTeam partner.
Now see, if you had flown Delta this would never have happened.
US Airways, on the other hand, may be a different story.
Eh… Had I flown Delta, Czech Airlines would still have been the ground handling agent.