Flights to Europe almost back to normal? Not on KLM

Last week’s volcano ash issue was unquestionably the worst time for travelers to Europe since September 11 — airspace closure lasted longer and overall more flights were canceled

But this week, airlines have been indicating their planes are taking off and landing normally. As with many statements made by the airlines, the truth is somewhat in between disaster and normal traffic mode. KLM (serviced by Delta Air Lines) is still in the midst of customer service hell.

The KLM situation for travelers in the U.S. has been especially problematic since the Delta merger with Northwest. Northwest-KLM functioned as one airline, though the KLM portion since 2004 has actually been owned by Air France. Yet, since Northwest did all the ticketing for KLM under a previous contract, that contract remained in force and was taken over by Delta.

What KLM passengers have ended up with is an airline owned by Air France, without a U.S. presence or phone contact, where all ticketing and reservations are handled by Delta. Nothing can go wrong here, right? Unfortunately, the system works about as well as it looks on paper.

So far, most of the problems have been in dealing with customer relations following up on problems with KLM service or ticketing after the fact. Adding to the normal hassles of airline problem solving, is the the fact that not all Delta agents know how to find KLM reservations in their system. But this, post-volcano week has brought a new low to KLM’s service and communications through the Delta system (or non-system).

Apparently KLM decided to cancel some flights and/or move some planes around after the volcano mess. So for the next several days, they have canceled their JFK-Amsterdam flights, which were on 777 aircraft, and rebooked passengers on other flights.

The lucky ones, and it appears to be random, got booked on a smaller backup plane on the same non-stop route. The unlucky ones got rebooked, for example, on a JFK-Philadelphia-Paris-Amsterdam flight. To make matters even more fun, the airline didn’t tell anybody, at least not anyone booked from the U.S. and ticketed through Delta.

Travelers discovered this only as clients discovered the secret changes. An unhappy administrative assistant emailed the office saying that her boss had been put on the three flight backup when he showed up at the airport. The gate agent asserted “We did this WEEKS ago, ” and indicated that the travel agent should have known. They didn’t offer him so much as a free drink.

Were we wrong? Did I miss something. No. In our system, there was no schedule change or any message, other than a confirmation of an aisle seat last month. The flight looked normal.

When I called Delta, the first agent (as is par for the course) couldn’t find the reservation. I called back, got a competent agent who sighed and said, “It’s been really bad.” What she found was that the flight had been canceled only the night before, and KLM put a note in the record saying, “Unable to contact passenger.”

Adding insult to injury, the phone number they noted in the record that they had used to reach the passenger, was not our agency number — required in all bookings, but Delta’s international phone number. So, the number they said they had used to try to contact the passenger, was their OWN reservation number in the states.

I remembered two other people I had booked on the same canceled flight, and called Delta back about those reservations. The reservations from our end looked fine. But this time I got the best Delta agent of the afternoon, and she was able to pull up the KLM flight, and discovered it too had been canceled. Fortunately, in this case, the clients were put on a 767 nonstop with a different flight number at the same time.

According to the competent agent, KLM changed their JFK-Amsterdam flights for several days to these smaller planes, and according to some internal formula or random luck, is putting some people on the non-stops and others on the milk run. It’s only luck if anyone is finding out it advance.

Apparently April 29 to May 3, according to the KLM website, is “Holiday Season” in the Netherlands, but heaven knows if that is a factor. If you call the number on the site for questions, it rings into Delta reservations.

In this case, the “lucky” clients with good seat assignments on the original flight, weren’t so lucky when it came to getting those seats transferred over to the new flight. Fortunately, the agent was able to secure decent seats. So these two people at least will not be terribly inconvenienced.

I understand that the volcano has made life difficult for many airlines. But on the other hand, when passengers purchase tickets, especially nonrefundable, non-stop tickets, they should receive both notification and compensation when those flights are changed at the last minute so radically. As opposed to the “we don’t give a darn” attitude displayed by Delta and their partner KLM.

At this point, I can try to protect clients by warning them that the Delta-KLM partnership is troublesome at best and try to book alternate airlines. (Admittedly this is difficult in the Amsterdam market, which is why I booked KLM in the first place.)

But as the industry consolidates, it seems like travel agents and passengers alike will be dealing with more and more of this kind of confusion. Because the more different computer systems, different systems and employees from different airlines have to be merged together, the more confusion is created. And, when it’s someone else’s airline, the less incentive to care.