The worst flight I've taken (yet) - thanks, Alaska Airlines

Crowdstruck? Not quite… #

For my work, I get to travel a bit. Now, it’s not like I do one flight a month or something, but I’ve had a fair share of my flight experiences - missed flights, turburlent flights, skidding tyre-flights, circling-around-forever-flights, I’ve seen it all. My first international flight was also one of the most memorable experiences.

On Sunday, July 21 - I had my flight from Seattle to Denver operated by on Alaska Airlines. I thought it would be a simple flight - the effects of Crowdstrike’s outage had settled down, but of course, Murphy had other ideas. I reached the Seattle Aiport about 2 hours prior to departure and spent an hour and half at Brewtop Social, having my lunch. As it got closer to the boarding time, I went over to the gate. Boarding completed pretty smoothly and we were all set to go.

Just then, the flight was initially delayed due to air traffic clearance issues - we were told that there was a violent storm in Denver and thus ATC did not provide the clearance. We also realized there was no airconditioning, and the captain informed us that this is temporary and soon as we take off, the airconditioners were kick in. With Seattle temperatures being more than 35 degrees Celsius it got very hot very fast.

To make matters worse, we kept getting conflicting news about when we would be able to take off. As if that was not enough, once we got the clearance from ATC, we were informed that there’s some diagnostic light that is on and it needs to be checked by the maintenance folks and that the plane needs to be taken back to the gate. We were told we’d get an external air-conditioning unit, but they weren’t able to procure that, and more than two hours of staying in the plane, the captain decided to deplane us so that we can remain in the cool confines of our airconditioned gate.

For the next two hours, Alaska kept delaying the departure time by 30 minutes, sharing no information other than ‘getting ready for boarding.’

Finally, after more than 5 hours of when we were supposed to depart, we were finally boarded again (this time again, there was no airconditioning, but it had cooled down enough that it wasn’t hot).

Alaska’s failed communications #

Throughout the entire time, Alaska failed to communicate clearly with what’s happening. This was particularly bad after we got deplaned - the gate agents had no idea about what was happening - they said nothing apart from “Stay around this area”.

When I asked the gate agent for more details, they brusquely shoved a customer care contact details pamphlet to me and said here, call them. I was tempted to respond rudely, but I decided not to for it would just make it worse.

More than an hour later, they mumbled something about reimbursing us for any food we bought at that moment, but we would need proof. At this point, I had purchased some lemonade and didn’t get a receipt for this, so I couldn’t get this reimbursed. What’s supremely frustrating was just the sheer lack of information. At one point they actually said - “you’re at gate D4”. Yes, and?!

Compensation? #

Apart from a bunch of flight delay notifications, I received an apology email and a note that Alaska will email a $200 discount for a future flight. I’m not sure what to think of that, given that the coupon is likely to be useless to me since I’m not based in the US and it will probably expire by the time I return to the US. Anyway, once I get more details of this “discount” I will update this page.

Wrapping up #

Now I’m not going to say I’ll never fly on Alaska ever - I still need to fly back this weekend and hope everything goes ok on that flight. I get that delays happen and I don’t demand instant gratification. A little bit of communication and transparency is hardly a bad thing to ask for.