I am absolutely appalled at the customer service me and my girlfriend received at the Philadelphia airport. She had purchased a ticket for a flight on April 24th about a month or so in advance and it got canceled within a week of said flight. Okay, not the end of the world. The very next day she rescheduled for a flight on April 25th. This flight was then also cancelled. But then, it wasn’t. It was available for scheduling again on the website, so my girlfriend just rescheduled for the same flight again. It was odd, but the flight was available again, so we just went with business as usual.
So we drove to the airport, an hour and a half drive, and when we get there she types in her confirmation number and it says the flight has been canceled. Now, the previous two cancellations came with a notification saying the flight had been canceled. My girlfriend checked for one the whole drive there and did not receive one. Needless to say after the drive, this was a frustrating revelation. We spoke with an attendant at the nearby counter and explained the situation, and she told us that the only thing she could do was book us a flight for the following morning at 7:00 AM. We’d need to be there at 6:00 AM which meant we’d have to leave at 4:00 AM. This was not convenient for us, and it meant we’d have to make another 3 hour round trip drive.
So we found ourselves speaking with a different attendant regarding what happened and asked if we could be transferred to a flight with a different airline, something many other airlines do in these situations (my dad, a million mile flyer, can attest to this) only to be told this was impossible, despite there being an American Airlines flight in a few hours with lots of available seats. I explained my lack of confidence that the flight the next day would actually go out, and the attendant expressed that she also was not confident.
As the conversation went on, things got heated, with a supervisor stepping in as the original attendant began yelling and accusing us of lying and saying that we known it’d been canceled before driving an hour and a half out to the airport, which makes no sense. The supervisor told me he refused to speak to me because I wasn’t the passenger, despite this nonsense affecting me too since I have to drive and house my girlfriend for the remainder of her time here. We were told that our options were to keep the flight for the following day (the one the attendant originally had no confidence in, but now in the presence of her supervisor couldn’t accurately say how likely it was that it’d go out) or to get a refund in the form of a voucher for another southwest flight. Neither was a satisfactory solution given that, as far as we could tell, this was an error on their end.
I’m struggling to convey the rudeness, hostility, and apathy we were met with in this situation, but I can promise you it was genuinely upsetting, with my girlfriend choking back tears during the exchange before breaking down in the car afterwards as we drove home. I’m left expecting a similar experience for the following flight, and the whole experience has left us feeling as though we will never travel with Southwest again. This behavior was absolutely unacceptable, hurtful, unprofessional, and unaccommodating.
