JetBlast
Distinguished Member
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2007
- Messages
- 5,671
- Reaction score
- 14
I had a very disconcerting incident at work today, and I'm still trying to understand just why exactly this happened.
We have a flight leaving from the airport this morning, booked about halfway full going to LAX (we had 7 seats open in first class, with 17 booked). Myself and another gate agent are running this particular flight. On my list of passengers happens to be five members of our armed forces returning home from Iraq (all of them come through our airport after arriving from overseas). I decide that, as usual, since we have open seats in first class I am going to upgrade them on their flight home. Neither the military or the soldiers pay for this.
I ask the soldiers to come up to the podium and I issue them their new first tickets, they were very grateful for this. They go back and sit down in their seats. About five minutes later a rather irate gentleman comes up to me and demands to know why I upgraded them; he, too, would like an upgrade if there are empty seats, and he wasn't going to pay for it. I simply told him no, and he fumed on over back to his seat. A few minutes later he comes back over to me and demands my name so he can file a complaint, or that the soldiers return their tickets.
By this time the flight crew had shown up for the outbound flight and I spoke to the pilot about the situation. I called the military members over and informed them that they would be boarding last and needed to return their boarding passes to me- I would give them their stubs back when they got on the airplane and they were in their first class seats. They boarded without incident but did get some applause from other gates as they boarded, which was nice. I am still waiting to hear if a complaint was lodged against me by the irate fellow.
I'm not going to name the airline involved but needless to say I was not happy about the whole thing. I figured SF might be an interesting place to ask- how would you have handled this situation?
We have a flight leaving from the airport this morning, booked about halfway full going to LAX (we had 7 seats open in first class, with 17 booked). Myself and another gate agent are running this particular flight. On my list of passengers happens to be five members of our armed forces returning home from Iraq (all of them come through our airport after arriving from overseas). I decide that, as usual, since we have open seats in first class I am going to upgrade them on their flight home. Neither the military or the soldiers pay for this.
I ask the soldiers to come up to the podium and I issue them their new first tickets, they were very grateful for this. They go back and sit down in their seats. About five minutes later a rather irate gentleman comes up to me and demands to know why I upgraded them; he, too, would like an upgrade if there are empty seats, and he wasn't going to pay for it. I simply told him no, and he fumed on over back to his seat. A few minutes later he comes back over to me and demands my name so he can file a complaint, or that the soldiers return their tickets.
By this time the flight crew had shown up for the outbound flight and I spoke to the pilot about the situation. I called the military members over and informed them that they would be boarding last and needed to return their boarding passes to me- I would give them their stubs back when they got on the airplane and they were in their first class seats. They boarded without incident but did get some applause from other gates as they boarded, which was nice. I am still waiting to hear if a complaint was lodged against me by the irate fellow.
I'm not going to name the airline involved but needless to say I was not happy about the whole thing. I figured SF might be an interesting place to ask- how would you have handled this situation?