[annoyed in STL]

I saw the poor woman who posted about missing a catscan. This makes my post seem a little silly but I'll post it anyway because IM SO ANNOYED

Here is my letter I penned today to Southwest
January 5, 2009


Dear WHOEVER CARES:

I just got off the phone with your inflexible employee Karen in customer service (#2843). I find it amusing that she spent several minutes telling me how flexible you are at Southwest yet by the end of the call, there was nothing that was able to be done to solve my problem.
I purchased a ticket last January for travel in Feb. It went unused. In November, I used that credit to purchase what I thought was one ticket to Chicago, but evidently it also went toward my daughter’s ticket too rendering it useless after Jan. 29.

Keep in mind this entire trip to Chicago was to take a four-year-old girl to the American Girl doll store. Don’t lose sight of that.

We are traveling with a friend who had to change her plans. So we wanted to switch the trip to Jan. 30 and 31. I understood there was a chance we would have to eat one ticket because of the expiration, or pay the $50 to extend it. BUT to my surprise, because a WHOLE $12 of the credit was used on my daughters ticket, we would have to pay $100 to extend it and GUESS WHAT, not only that, it couldn’t be DONE IN TIME to allow us to travel on Jan 30th because we would have to WAIT for that ticket to expire.

So thanks to your flexible re-booking options, I CANT REBOOK MY TRIP TO TAKE A FOUR YEAR OLD TO GET A DOLL!

This is extremely frustrating to me and it was clear Karen felt she would have absolutely no repercussion to not helping a customer. It’s a sad day when even Southwest has faltered when it comes to making customers happy. Frankly, if I want to get screwed, I’ll stick with American where I at least have an assigned seat.

So for a one-day extension, or a $50 charge instead of a $100 charge or just saying OK, you’re a good customer of ours, we’ll make this one exception, you’ve made me mad enough to write this letter and tell everyone I know about my experience. Too bad for you. I hope it was worth it.