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.
