The Background
My brother, his wife, my partner and I thought it would be a great idea to do a trip together this year. Initially we were thinking a small boat Alaskan cruise, but the best ones were already booked so we looked at other options.
Italy was next on the list for us, the food, the scenery, the history. Southern Europe in May. Perfect.
The Preparation
We did a bunch of planning and spent $3000 on tickets. We got out our passports and saw that hers was expired already and mine expires in August, so we did some research and figured out we'd have to do expedited renewal for hers to make sure it happened in time, and as this has an additional fee and mine would be good for months after we got back, renew mine after we got back.
Starting a month before the trip we worked with my brother and his wife (okay, let's be honest, we worked with his wife) to get reservations at wonderful sounding bed and breakfasts across southern Italy and Sicily, a rental car reservation for the entire 10 days, bought guide and phrase books and started marking the places that sounded particularly fun and interesting.
Then a Google Docs spreadsheet to make sure we packed and did everything before we left, cleaned the apartment top to bottom so we'd come home to a stress-free clean home.
Off to the Airport
Got up at 5am, finished the last of the packing, fed and watered the cats and fed the newt, walked over to the BART station for the very first train of the morning. We arrived at SFO more than an hour and a half before the flight, went to the first kiosk we saw and... I had no seat for the first flight, and I couldn't select one. That was weird, but we figured we'd talk to a checkin rep and get it figured out. It asked us to scan our passports, which I did... and it said I needed to talk to a representative and stopped the transaction.
We get to the checkin line (we had our tickets through Alitalia, but Delta was operating the flight from SFO to Atlanta, and the flight from Atlanta to Milan), checked in our bag, it got tagged and sent along, then handed the rep our passports, and she frowned. And looked confused. And I explained how the kiosk had given us the strange message but I knew my passport wasn't expired, it was good until August, and our trip was only ten days long.
Denied
She got ahold of someone else who works there and told him to go fetch our bag, explaining she'd be in a lot of trouble if they didn't stop the bag. We were stunned and trying to figure out what was going on, clearly they weren't going to stop us from taking our trip because my passport was not expired, right?
She explained that due to heightened security since Bin Laden was killed, the passport needed to have at least six months left on it. No one had told us anything of the sort at any point in the process of buying $3000 worth of international travel tickets. We had renewed my partner's passport, it would have been easy to do mine at the same time if we had known. She said a couple months ago we would have been fine.
She thought we could get the passport temporarily extended, get ahold of their customer service department, and maybe fly out tomorrow instead. It sounded to me like she knew this was possible and had seen people do it, so we wandered over to a seat and I got out my laptop and tried to figure out how to do it.
The Scramble
No such thing exists that I could find. You can try to get your passport renewed quickly, there are services out there that do it. However, you need to spend around $300 plus the renewal fee plus the expediting fee and you have to have booked tickets (an itinerary from the airline).
I called the number on the State Department's website to schedule a quick, in person passport renewal. You had to have an itinerary but it would be done same day. I asked for the next available appointment, and it offered... May 25th. Two days after we were to get back.
This was Saturday, so as far as I could tell I would need to get the tickets changed to a date I wasn't sure I could fly on, send my passport and lots of money to a service I hoped was on the level, get my passport renewed (hopefully), then get it back and fly out.
The big problem was that this was really our only chance at this vacation, my partner teaches science summer camps at a science museum in the Bay Area, so the entire summer was booked, plus she's now 17 weeks pregnant with our first child, so after summer she can't fly, then we'll have a newborn. Maybe early Spring next year we can reasonably travel to Italy, but not before.
"Customer Service"
I call Alitalia and explain the situation, and the rep gets very defensive right away. This is not their fault, they can't be held responsible for this, there's no way they can refund if it isn't their fault. With the fare I had, there would be a change fee if I wanted to modify it and use it for something else, but I had to do so on that day or it would be marked as a no show and I would lose the ticket completely.
I didn't claim it was their fault, it isn't, I just wanted help to deal with a bad situation. Not only was I not going on a vacation we'd been looking forward to for months, but we'd spent thousands of dollars on this and gone to the airport expecting to travel. We were stunned and very disappointed and unhappy and I wanted someone to help me navigate my options so we could salvage something.
After being told I needed to figure out where we would change the tickets to right now or lose the tickets, I told her that was impossible. She 'clarified' and said as long as we called back today it would be okay, but we had to decide where and when we would be flying today or we would be considered a no show and lose the tickets completely. I thanked her, and we got all our stuff back together and took BART back home.
All in all I'd been on the phone with Alitalia, including calling back after dropped connections, about an hour.
Home Again
When we got home I sat stunned while my partner, wonderful person that she is, hit kayak.com and tried to find alternative trips that we could take that would use Alitalia partner airlines and cost the same or as close to it as possible. We couldn't make it happen in one non-international trip, and we didn't know if they'd let us replace the one ticket with more than one trip. I needed to call them back, and I did not want to do it. It was clear they were in this to protect themselves and could care less about their customer.
"Customer Service", Round 2
After some food and coffee I dialed the number again and started talking to a new representative. He tried to stop me at any opening to claim that what I had just told him meant he couldn't help me, but I insisted that I had talked to another representative who had said that it wasn't a no show if I called back today, for instance, and no he couldn't just claim it was and I was out of luck.
He keeps working on it and puts me on hold a few times (I presume to talk to managers about the situation).
At one hour and fifteen minutes into the call an automatic voice comes on and speaks at me in Italian. I don't know what it said, I can only assume it is something like "If you don't press <button number> within the next few seconds we're going to hang up on you!", which is what it did.
After a long stretch of cursing I redial and get the "all our representatives are busy right now" type message. A little while into that a familiar voice answers and says that they're running behind, if I could leave my name and number with him he'd have someone call me back. I say I'd just been on the line for an hour and a quarter with someone, and to his credit he admitted it was him and we picked up where we left off. I asked his name in case I got disconnected again, it was "Joe".
Then he says that due to my ticket class I had to keep the same itinerary and could only change the dates. However, travel would have to be completed before March 25th, 2012 (one year after I bought the tickets) or it would expire. I love that it is based on when I bought them, not when travel occurs.
Remember, kids, book as late as possible or they'll punish you for it.
My partner and I determine that if we were to do the same trip next March we'd have a five month old and it would be possible to handle. So we ask him to move the flights to March 10th - 24th, 2012 (if we're going to reschedule that far in advance we might as well spend more time and money in Italy, right?). He works, he asks questions, he misunderstands the situation again and again and I spend a lot of time explaining to him the itinerary that Alitalia sold me. I was looking at the confirmation mail from his company, which I had given him codes and flight numbers and everything off of, and having to correct him about what it meant.
After many false starts he finally had it figured out, we could change our flights to next year and save the flights and just pay some fees to get it changed. All we had to do was pay the difference between the cost of the new tickets and the ones we had paid for:
$5106.68
I quickly brought up the calculator on my computer and did 5106.68 - 2952.20... Excuse me, do you really want me to pay 2154.48 in order to salvage 2952.20 worth of tickets?
No, he says, 5106.68 *is* the difference, not the total, I would need to spend over five thousand dollars in order to salvage three thousand dollars worth of tickets.
My partner's eyes get huge, she could hear the whole conversation, and she grabbed her laptop, went to kayak.com again (love that site), and looked for Alitalia partner airline flights that would do the same March 2012 trip we're talking about and it came back at about $2200 total for both of us.
I expressed... disbelief at Joe. He said this is the only way to do it, I had to pay a $200 fee *per leg*, a $20 fee for something or another, multiple tickets needed to be upgraded to fares that allowed them to be changed at all. In the end the whole thing would cost $8058.88.
And he honestly seemed to think I should be willing to pay it. I explained that I'd have to be a complete fool to pay over $5000 to get tickets I can get for half of that this very second. He sounded hurt, like I hadn't valued all his time and effort (we'd been on the phone together for over two hours at this point).
I explained at length that although I did not blame Alitalia for my not being able to take the trip, my experience with their customer service made me want to avoid ever doing business with them again under any circumstances. I had also come across reviews and complaints about Alitalia customer service while researching my options since being denied boarding.
They do not have a legal requirement to help me with my situation, but real customer service is about making the customers happy and want to do business with you again. I've had that experience with Southwest. I love them, I travel with them whenever possible because they have solved my problems, not reflexively defended themselves from their customers.
After explaining this and trying to convey to him that I'm not angry with him, I appreciate the time and effort he's put into helping me, and I'm sorry he's clearly kept from doing his job by stupid policies his employer burdens him with, after that rant he says he's sorry that I feel that way and gives me contact information to Alitalia's New York City Customer Relations Department:
customer.relationsnyc@alitalia.it - 212-903-3575
I am going to send them a link to this post, because I really don't want to have to explain the whole situation over and over and over like I have been doing, and see if they will step up and do something, anything, to make me want to do business with them ever again. If not, I will continue to let people know they shouldn't either.
If they step up, I'll be telling everyone how they did and the degree to which I'm happy about it.
Your move, Alitalia.
Update 1: Not much to say, got one response asking for info and then nothing for a week.
Update 2: Still not much to say, except they don't want to be bothered by their customer while investigating that customer's claim.
Update 3: They seem to think we should have been allowed to fly!
Update 4: Kicked the can over to Delta, who are being even less responsive.
Update 5: Delta continues to be unresponsive.
Update 6: Delta declares: Not our fault, not our problem.
Update 7: Happy ending after all!
