My
wife and I booked a trip the other weekend.We wanted to fly from Boston
to Atlanta and then return from CharlestonSC so that we could do some
sailing at LakeLanier
and then stay a few days at my parents’ place.I have a Delta Sky Miles American Express card, which lets
me pay for
part of the flight with sky miles; now that you need to burn 50,000
miles
to get a ticket anywhere it's kind of nice.I
was able
to set up a ticket for myself without any problem.Then we went to set up my wife’s... She
also has a Sky Miles account, so we were
going to do the same thing, but it turns out the ‘pay with miles’
option wasn’t
available to her because she didn’t have the Am Ex card.Then I remembered that I had a companion
certificate that came with the card that was supposed to let her travel
with me
for $99 bucks.So I called up Delta and
after ten minutes on hold and five minutes attempting to communicate
with a
woman with an indecipherable accent (Indian call center?) we determined
that we
were out of luck because the certificate could only be used for a round
trip to
a single destination.OK, so the
supposed perk is useless.Next we tried
to buy the ticket through her sky miles account but using my credit
card.No go, to deduct miles the name on
the ticket
has to match the name on the card.So we
tried to get her added to the card – called up the Delta/AmEx number,
and got
her a card issued – but it would take a week to ten days to show up, no
benefit
today.Finally we looked at transferring
20,000 miles from her account to mine to get a $200 discount.But, it turns out they charge you a penny a
mile, or in other words, exactly $200 to
do it.Finally we threw up our hands and
were going to just buy the ticket…and in the hour and a half we had
been
fighting with Delta over the phone, the price had jumped by $110.Calling them up to try to get the original
fare we wasted another twenty minutes, to no avail.
With
the tickets finally squared away, we moved on to the next errand of the
day,
which was to pile the dogs into the car for a trip to the pet groomer
to have
their nails clipped.But, we had wasted
so much time dealing with Delta that by the time we got there the
groomer was
closed.So the next morning when Sage
stepped on my foot in his usual scramble to get out the back door, he
accidentally gouged me.Then, a week later, after we hadn’t had another chance to
take the boys
to have their nails clipped, Phineas caught his left dew claw on
something in
the yard and came limping back in the house, whimpering any time
someone went
near his wounded paw.Which resulted in a
trip to the
vet.
When
I lived in Atlanta,
I liked Delta; they were the hometown team, and you could get basically
anywhere from Hartsfield on a direct flight. But now I’m
ready for them to disappear into a cloud of bankruptcy and never return.