Heard from Delta

I had gotten a "how did we do?" survey from Delta for my flight down, and told them how I thought they did, relating my experience. Just got a call from George in customer complaint resolution, and I have to say that he did as good a job as he could. He just kept totally agreeing with me. Said stuff like "we dropped the ball" and that sort of thing.

At one point he said something like "we just didn't communicate with the customer" and I said to him that I have sat in countless meetings and I can imagine all the meetings that took place about this change. That it is stunning that no one placed "communicate with customers" as the #1 priority.

I did praise the Delta employees who were really doing the best they can. He did tell me that the vans were different so that no one really could tell which were Delta vans and which weren't. You'd think someone would make giant banners for the vehicles that said "get on this shuttle for Delta's Terminal C." In a case like this, I don't think you can have too much signage or too much obvious signage.

I really can picture this meeting where the self-satisfied execs said "we'll have people outside getting people into the vans and signage inside pointing the way" and that's enough.

Delta sends out a "it's time to check in" email the night before. You'd think (and George agreed) that you could have included the change in terminals in that email.

I also pointed out that Delta knew for weeks that this change was going to happen. It's not like a tornado went through LGA -- and if it had, then Delta would have done a good job. So I concluded by saying that Delta took a great positive happening -- expanding its presence at LGA and turned it into a way to piss customers off.

By the way, when I returned on Thursday to LGA, the confusion was still going on.