There is no better way to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and prepare to travel than to receive a message that the flight was canceled — except for when I found out that my canceled flight departed without me.
My Canceled Flight Departed Without Me.
I recently was to be a passenger on an airplane that was operated by Frontier Airlines; and the flight was to depart in the morning. Between waking up and getting myself prepared to leave, the time needed to travel to the airport which may include slower traffic, check in for the flight, go through the security checkpoint — and perhaps get in a little bit of airport lounge experience, if time was available — I needed to awaken at 4:30 in the morning…
…but the flight was canceled due to “Canceled operational reasons” — whatever that means — and the next flight was not for another eleven hours.
Well — what can I do?
I then received a message from Frontier Airlines that I can change back to my original flight in the morning…
…greater than one hour after the airplane for that flight had already departed.
I asked an agent for Frontier Airlines about this; and this is the answer which I received:
Upon checking on your reservation, original flight was canceled and rebooked. Please know that it is never our intention to cause an inconvenienced to our passengers. We are very sorry for the inconvenience. We work very hard to avoid schedule changes and cancellations to the flights and regret that they are inconvenient for our passengers. These are unexpected flight disruptions that occur in real-time, on the day of departure, and are managed by the SOC and Airport Agents. Examples are mechanical issues, crew scheduling, Weather, ATC (Air Traffic Control), or Bird or lightning strikes (Environmental events). These cause flight delays, cancellations, and diversions.
Well, that explains everything.
Final Boarding Call
I will spare you the seemingly endless messaging back and forth between Frontier Airlines and myself, which is at least a couple of hours of my time I will never get back. The short version of this ridiculousness is that I never received an explanation for the reasons why the morning flight was canceled; and the reasons why I first received notice that the flight was reinstated greater than one hour after the airplane had already departed.
I did eventually receive a voucher worth $25.00 for a future flight valid for 90 days as a gesture of goodwill. I suppose that is better than nothing.
What would you have done if you experienced a similar situation?
Photograph ©2022 by Brian Cohen.
