My Mother recently had a great experience with Alaska Airlines. My parents run a psoriasis skin care company. She went to the mid-year meeting of The American Osteopathic College of Dermatology (that’s her, on the right with Lorelei, the manager of Ontos) to promote their products.
On their way home, in San Jose, the plane broke down on the tarmac (whoops). Alaska promptly sent an engineer out to fix the prop that was broken. Unfortunately, the mechanic was called away to another issue before fixing the problem. After 2 hours on the runway, all the passengers were offloaded. Rather than forcing all the passengers to remain overnight in San Jose, Alaska Air went the extra mile and scheduled multiple shuttles to another airport, San Francisco, so that my Mom and others could make it on a flight back to Seattle that night. My Mom especially liked stewardess Deb (who makes her home base out of Portland) and thought the pilot was hilarious. Apparently, he was cracking jokes the entire time they were stuck on the runway. Kudos to Alaska for not only treating my Mom right but for making a great customer experience turnaround out of an otherwise dismal situation.
Somehow, I doubt that United would have done the same.
Remember my little United fiasco? They gave me $225 in credit to use on a future flight and an apology letter that thanked me for my “candid remarks regarding their staff.” Of course, this was after “Nathan” in Customer Care told me that, “they don’t compensate for bad behavior.”
After the way Alaska treated my Mom, I’m going to try to fly more with them.
AM, thank for the info about the airlines and also for that link to your mom’s business. Someone recently asked me if there was a soap I could make to help their psoriasis. Of course, I couldn’t do that 🙁 But I will tell them about Ontos and give them the link.
Hi Jean,
I’m glad that you’re excited about Ontos. That’s great. The really effective formula is the Noble Formula that requires a doctor’s prescription. It’s worth a trip to the Doctor to get that prescription.
Teresa, thanks for the compliments on the seasonal header. It’ll be back to normal on Monday or Tuesday but with the season, it’s hard to not want to go “all out” with pastels. =)
I think it’s awesome that so many of you have had positive experiences with Alaska. I’m vowing to fly more with them this year. =)
Forget the airlines, thanks for the link to your parents company! My husband has psoriasis and has really been looking for something different to try. His flare ups have gotten pretty bad, but the side effects on a lot of the drugs are pretty scary, so he doesn’t really want to go that route. It’s so hard to know which companies are valid, but I’m sure I can trust your mom. 🙂 I just placed an order and will be anxiously awaiting its arrival!
Jean
“Bad behavior”??? They are surely not talking about your behavior. The gall!
Good to know about Alaskan Airlines, although I don’t know that they do many flights out of the midwest.
Ah, I just noticed the new header…soooo cute!!
After having terrible experiences with United over 20 years ago, I will never fly them again. They are nasty, and they managed to lose my luggage every trip I ever took on them.
Alaska, on the other hand, is great. They usually hire people with great personalities, and they are willing to go the extra way to make sure that you are happy. Their mileage plan is incredible. My husband travels for work, and he tries to always fly Alaska. That makes for some fun vacations for us when we redeem his miles!
LeAnn
I haven’t had many bad experiences with airlines thankfully. Just MAS once when they left my luggage back in Melbourne. But they were very apologetic and I guess it does happen often.
Alaska sounds like a great airline to fly with though.
Alaska Airlines has phenomenal pilots. They will even point out glaciers & Mt’s to look at while flying. The flight attendants are always wonderful. 2 of my kids were flying at 4 days old and the flight attendants always wanted to hold them. I have never had a bad experience with them.
Hmmm…I had the exact same thought. Save $225 on another bad experience??? Tough call!
On another note, thanks for the powder post link…I’m sure you saved me plenty of mistakes and $$ = )
Yeah, I don’t know if they expect me to try and use the credit or what the deal is because I am going to try really hard NOT to fly with them.
Then again, $225 discount off a flight is a pretty aggressive discount… =)
Does United actually want you to use that credit, after their poor performance? Is it supposed to make up for everything?