One certainty in life is that everyone makes mistakes. For those who don’t know, I moved back to the greater Seattle area in August and after flying all of September on US Airways’ absolutely horrible west coast routes I decided to try another airline. My choice was somewhat narrowed as only one airline hubs at SEA – Alaska Airlines.
I’ve always heard wonderful, raving reviews about Alaska’s customer centered attitudes, they have a tremendous number of routes of out SEA and, while not a member of any of the big three alliances, they partner with quite a few airlines that together can take me anywhere I want to go in the world.
So, all this information in hand and determined to give them a shot, I booked two weeks of travel on them. Both weeks were SEA-DFW r/t. My first segment (AS 806, SEA->DFW in Y) on 09/30 was fairly impressive. The plane boarded quickly and orderly, the crew was attentive, the plane was actually clean – a very nice change from US – and they even served nice warm white chocolate macadamia nut cookies as a snack. This first segment gave me the warm fuzzies.
Unfortunately, my return segment (AS 809, DFW->SEA in F) on 10/05 was less than spectacular. Upon arrival at DFW, the very friendly ticketing agent accepted my checked bag, handed me my boarding pass and directed me to gate E11. I ventured to E11, only to find the boarding area packed with passengers. Not looking forward to a full flight, I sat down at a nearby gate and began reading my book. About 45 minutes later, they announced a gate change to E31. While gate changes aren’t frequent in my experience, they’re not rare either – so I got up and journeyed over to E31. I got to E31, found a seat and sat down to read my book again. Not 5 minutes later, they announce another gate change – back to E11. A little ticked off, I took the skylink back over to E11. 27 minutes after I arrived at E11 for the second time, they changed the gate back to E31, again. More than a little pissed off, I went back to E31 and stood over by the f/c boarding area. The plane was already about 20 minutes late in boarding at this time and I was very relieved when they started boarding the passengers.
Unfortunately, they only boarded the first four passengers. Then they shut the jet way door and disappeared for 20 minutes. When the door opened again, who to my wandering eyes did appear? You guessed it – the four passengers that had been boarded and then removed from the plane. Yet another gate change announcement was made – BACK TO E11.
Fast forward 2 hours and we finally boarded the flight, where I encountered a very nice cabin crew, extremely comfortable seats in F and a very intoxicated seat mate. The flight to SEA went off without issue from there. I enjoyed the digEplayer that they use in lieu of a seat back IFE and the simple pepperoni pizza and spinach salad meal was quite tasty. We eventually arrived over two hours late but it wasn’t a huge issue thinking back on it.
While waiting at baggage claim in SEA, I talked to a gentleman who flies 300K+ annual miles and got his opinion of AS. After listening to his experiences, and his statement that the events of flight 809 were ‘not normal’, I decided not to rebook this current week’s travel on to a different airline and give them another shot.
Upon arriving at the airport last night, I got in line at the Alaska ticket counter to grab my Y boarding pass on flight 806 SEA->DFW and check my bag. Unfortunately the line wasn’t moving. :(
It appears that all of Alaska’s computer systems, including operations, failed last night just before I was going to check in. I waited in line for about 35 minutes before they came back up, the whole time envisioning enormous multi-hour delays. Remarkably though, Alaska came through. My flight took off about 15 minutes late, and actually arrive 8 minutes early.
I’ve been thinking about these experiences and realized something; Alaska has made more than their fair share of mistakes (2/3 of my segments so far) but has always been quick to admit their mistake and recover nicely. Whenever anything even remotely out of the normal happened on US, I was completely and utterly screwed – they didn’t know how to deal with it and hardly ever admitted their mistakes. So while Alaska has been troublesome so far, I’m going to keep flying them for awhile more to see how they perform in the long haul. I’ll post another entry with my updated opinion of them in a couple months.
