Had a pretty crazy travel experience this week. Headed down to DC for a meeting at the FCC on Amtrak. The ride is long but when factoring the hour drive to the airport, security, flight, etc. Amtrak from Old Saybrook is often less time. That is, of course, if the train is running on time.
It took us 6 HOURS to get out of Connecticut due to an engine with stuck brakes. They brought in another engine after an hour or two but didn’t detach the one with stuck brakes, so stuck we stayed. Eventually they limped us to Stamford where they just crammed all of us on the train behind us for the 5 hour ride to DC.
Then we got hit with some communications issues around Philly which added to the journey. All in took about 15 hours to get to my hotel. Even the cafe car was out of service.
The meeting was productive and then I took what should have been a quick Jetblue flight to Nantucket to meet up with the family for our annual weekend here. Quick in theory..
We sat on the taxiway for two hours before returning to the gate due to a northeast US air traffic control logjam. We finally took off three hours after our scheduled departure time. Just as we were on approach to Nantucket the fog rolled in and we were diverted to Boston!
We touched down at BOS at around 9:45 p.m. With Nantucket’s tower closing at 10:00 p.m. there was no way that plane was turning around. Jetblue staff were nowhere to be found in the airport as they probably knew there was a planeload of angry passengers coming their way. I booked the cheapest room I could find on hotels.com and headed off. I got there around 11 p.m. – 7 hours after I first boarded the plane.
I called JetBlue and their foreign call center told me to go back the airport and talk to customer service. No joke! Yet somehow they magically could fix the problem after I demanded to speak with a supervisor. They booked me on a flight the following morning and finally arrived around noon yesterday.
At least my meeting went well!
The silver lining in all of this is that Amtrak refunded my full fare unsolicited (and will provide a voucher for future travel) and JetBlue covered my Boston room, ground transportation and my uber eats deliveries. While both organizations responded well after the fact, a more proactive customer-first approach at the time these incidents were occurring would have cost them a lot less money.