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Blame God
Cheap Charlie · March 26, 2001

I'm in the middle of the "Storm of the Century." Of course we are only a couple of months into the century, but it is wreaking havoc anyway.

While I was on vacation in Miami, my brother called with news of the impending storm and suggested I try to get home early. It seems everyone else did the same as ell.

I called my airline and was assured that I could fly standby back to Boston, but there were no seats available to be reserved. If I could get on a flight, I could beat the storm. I got up a 5 a.m. so that I would be high on the standby list and got to the Miami airport early. After all I knew this would be a close call for standby.

Problems started early. The flight the night before had been cancelled so everyone was rolled over to the morning flights ... there went any possibility of flying standby early in the day. As the day went on more and more passengers started showing up to "try and beat the storm."

While the snow had not yet begun to fall in Boston or New York, it was already a disaster at the Miami airport. A disaster made more maddening by the total lack of information.

The gate personnel were working furiously trying to clear standby lists and move bumped passengers to other flights.

The monitors were blinking "confirmed" or "cancelled" but only for flights leaving in the next two hours. There was no way to know whether the 3, 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. flights were cancelled while scanning the screens at 11 a.m.

The airlines left passengers totally in the dark about future flights and did not man any of the "customer service" booths. Result: thousands of passengers milling about with no information.

I tried to get on the JFK flight. No luck. Then I tried La Guardia. No luck. Then I decided to try to go through Chicago. No luck. They I ran to the Raleigh-Durham gate. No luck. Now back to the Boston flight. No luck.

Then the information began to pop up on the screens. BOS: cancelled. JFK: cancelled. LGA: two flights cancelled. ORD: cancelled.

Flights being cancelled and hoards of weather-panicked passengers trying to squeeze onto already overbooked flights was a recipe for airport disaster, and it struck.

Bummer. The standby and confirmed passengers thought the storm was moving in and airports were closing. They shrugged their shoulders and headed back to their hotels. It was an Act of God. What could the airlines do?

I got back to my room and turned on the TV. Hey, the storm hadn't even arrived in Boston. What the heck? Why in the world was the airline canceling these flights?

There was no act of God! The airports were still open! The snow and rain hadn't even started! No Act of God.

No Act of God was in progress. The airlines simply cancelled the flights for reasons of their own.

Why? They didn't want to have planes stuck in the airport in case the storm arrived overnight? They didn't have aircraft available because of a mechanics union slowdown? They didn't have crews because of labor difficulties? They didn't have enough pilots because they weren't working overtime? Why?

It would be nice if the airlines let us know. Each flight cancellation has a cause. This weekend, we were led to believe these cancellations were weather-related. They were not. There was no Act of God.

I'm sure nothing short of a congressional inquiry or Act of Congress will ever force the airlines to reveal how they make their cancellation decisions.

This is just another example of the airlines making loud customer-service noises in newspapers, on TV and in the halls of Congress. However, when they speak to their passengers, customer service comes far behind company convenience.

Why doesn't the industry take some of the millions of dollars they are spending on lobbying and spend it on customer service, on manning service centers at the airports (especially when there is a natural disaster), on establishing a customer service phone system at the airport. Let us know what's up?

We want someone to talk to. We need someone who can answer questions about what really is happening.

Unfortunately, I don't see it happening any time soon. Even the gate personnel don't really know what's happening.

It's just the blind leading the blind. And when they fall into a ditch, it's tallied up as an Act of God.

Meanwhile, I'm still in Miami and the real Act of God is starting in Boston. And it looks like I'm stuck for a couple of days.

Charlie Leocha is the Boston-based author of Travel Rights: Know the Rules of the Road and the Air Before You Go. Cheap Charlie appears every Monday on this site. E-mail him at leocha@aol.com or access his Web site.