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DELTA AIRLINES:  Delta, Delta, Delta, what has happened to you?  A year ago I could call Delta and in under ten minutes have a great frequent flier ticket for 25,000 frequent flier miles.  Like a good consumer, I even have the Delta credit card.  I was excited about 2005 because I was over 50,000 miles and was looking forward to two free tickets.  I had earned them by exclusively flying Delta for over three years after all.  So naive.

You see, while nobody was looking, Delta changed their frequent flyer program.  Before it was simple.  Want a round trip domestic frequent flier ticket?  25,000 miles.  Now there are two tiers of domestic frequent flyer tickets -- SkySaver and SkyChoice.  The SkySaver tickets are 25,000 miles and have normal restrictions and the SkyChoice are 50,000 miles and have no restrictions.  That sounds great doesn't it?  As a consumer, you want choice and now I have SkySaver AND SkyChoice (think Clear Skies Act, Healthy Forests, etc).  The only issue is that there are no SkySaver tickets as far as I can tell.  This is what happend when I called to get a freqent flyer ticket a full five months in advance of my travel.  Let me repeat that -- five months in advance.

There are no SkySaver tickets available online, but there are plenty of SkyChoice tickets.  Confused by this new system I decide I will call them.  Certainly a live person will be able to find me a SkySaver ticket this far in advance!  I pick up the phone and dial.  It takes a long time to get a ring on the other end.  That's odd I thought, not realizing I was about to speak with every person in Bombay.

The process went something like this:  I give overly polite Indian customer service reps the dates and places I want to go.  They tell me nothing is available.  I give them alternate airports.  They tell me nothing is available.  I tell them that the airport they just gave me is in a different state than what I requested.  We have a conversation about what I mean by "state."  They say they have plenty of flights available into that airport -- if I can travel six days later than when I want.  I am also told they have FIRST CLASS frequent flier tickets available for 45,000 frequent flier miles, 5,000 less than the brand new SkyChoice coach tickets.  Great!  For the dates and places I requested, right?  Wrong.  If I travel a week earlier and go to New York I can get that first class ticket.  New York is great unless you want to go to Boston.  Apparently, Indians think Americans can do whatever they want whenever they want because it was just not sinking in that I had to fly on a certain day and return on a certain day and that all of the cities in the U.S. aren't next to each other and can be reached by bicycle.  I give up and accept the fact that my 50,000 frequent flier miles are only going to cover one ticket and that my flights are going to go through multiple cities.  That's what they mean by SkyChoice -- they choose and you lose.  Once we finally agree on an itinerary I am told that I have to be transferred to another department so they can verify the information.  Why the person I am speaking with can't verify "the information" I do not know.

I live 8,693 miles from Bombay, India, so it is no surprise that each time I had to be transferred to the verification department the call was lost.  This happened three times.  THREE TIMES!  So, three times I had to recall Delta and start the process from scratch, and each time I had to give a college level American geography class to my Indian helper even though I had all the flight #'s, dates, times, and airports ready.  The Indians were exceptionally polite, but when you are on the fourth phone call the pleasantness of hearing "Yes sir, yes sir, one moment sir" and "thank you" seven times in a row gets a little old.  Curse me out if it will shave an hour off the call.  So much for less than ten minutes. 

Delta, an airline that is 75 years old and the No. 3 airline in terms of air traffic, not only outsources customer service, but they just started outsourcing maintenance work to Canada.  Indonesia can't be far behind.  I feel safer already.  Delta just posted a loss of $1.1 billion for the first quarter of 2005.  Historically high fuel costs aren't helping (thanks George W!).  All I want, however, is a person that knows that Boston and New York aren't the same place.  So what do the whiz kids at Delta dream up to counter the increasing complaints about their Indian customer service centers?  According to the St. Petersburg Times in Florida (July 28, 2004), Delta actually flirted with the idea of charging people like me, and you, a fee if we wish to guarantee our calls will go to one of Delta's remaining U.S. based customer service centers.  We have to pay extra to talk to somebody whose first language is English.  Suffice to say that particular solution has yet to go into effect.

Delta reps say they save $25 million a year by sending calls to India.  I wonder how long those savings will last, as more and more customers (including me) begin to seek travel on other airlines who do not outsource their work.  For three years I travelled exclusively on Delta.  That loyalty just came to a grinding halt.  They're slashing costs but are still posting losses and losing customers.  I have a sneaky feeling that Delta's CEO hasn't posted a personal loss though, do you?

Think about it.  If this is what Delta does to their frequent flyer program -- a program that is alledgedly for the consumer -- I can't wait to see what they do to their pension plan.  Soon all the airlines will follow United's lead of defaulting on their employee pension plans.  The father of an ex-girlfriend of mine is a retired United pilot. He just sold his house and is moving into a smaller one because his pension was just cut in half.  Henry Ford paid his employees enough to afford the cars they built.  United's employees have to fly places too.

I love the airlines.  They go bankrupt and take billions in taxpayer money to bail them out.  They reorganize which means firing people, scaling back salaries, raising prices, charging for food, outsourcing, and getting rid of any other perks that make sitting in a flying tube for six hours somewhat bearable.  Then they default on their pension plans and once again dump their failures into the laps of the taxpayer.  A sweet double dip into the government's coffers (there go those "limited government" free market zealots again).  And yet, somehow, in all this mess, the CEOs of these companies fly around in private jets and when their operations crash and burn they jettison off to the nearest tropical island to live out their days in luxury.

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?  All I wanted was a laptop, healthy feet, and a frequent flier plane ticket to Boston, and what I got instead was con men, greedy men, and a bad connection.  Kinda makes you think that you just aren't as important as you think you are.  Once you were only as good as your money, now you are worse.  You are a consumer in a consumer society that doesn't care about the consumer anymore.  Get use to it.  Or DEMAND BETTER CONSUMERISM.   

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