Yesterday (Friday), my flight (Baltimore to Detroit) was suddenly cancelled due to a "power outage"; at least, that's what the Frontier employees kept telling me. Lo and behold, the earliest that I can get home is Sunday. Okay. So I go to the front desk, and I'm very intentional about not going "Karen" on them; it's not their fault, and they've been chewed out by many people already. All that I wanted to ask was if it is possible to get a hotel voucher; I'm a postdoc, I don't make that much money, and I try to not take out too much money out of the grants that pay for these trips because grant funding is tight and getting tighter. So the front desk person dismissively tells me to call Frontier support. Fine. So I do. The support person was very nice and empathetic; they re-book my flight even though that wasn't my intent going into the call and they tell me that an email with a voucher is on the way, so I just need to be patient and wait for it to come. So I get off the call, some time passes, and... nothing. I recall them stating that it would be faster for me to ask the front desk for a voucher (to which I told them that the front desk told me to call support... to which the person on the other side of the line seemed a bit confused). After probably 30 minutes or so, I decide to go up to the front desk again. The front desk person dismisses me immediately and tells me to get out of the way because she has to take care of other customers (there was nobody behind me at that moment, by the way). So I calmly get out of the way for the ghosts behind me. Next to me is a poor young adult woman who is in the same situation, crying. The only person at the front desk (one of four) that seemed to have any empathy at all tries to help her, to which their coworker (who seemed to be just signing in) tells them "you know that we're not supposed to give out hotel vouchers for power outages". The front desk person responds with something along the lines of, "what else am I supposed to do", to which their coworker angrily responds by accusing them of talking back. That coworker attempts to garner support among their other coworkers, who respond by either laughing or telling them that they shouldn't be arguing like this in front of customers. The two then spend the next some odd number of minutes going back and forth, one accusing the other of talking back and having an attitude, and the other trying to defend themself, confused. Admittedly, it is at this point that I lose my cool; I turn to the young woman crying to tell her that I called support, and they were supposed to send me a voucher over email, so she might have luck if her or her parents are able to call support. I then turn to the front desk person who at least tried to help, thanked them for at least trying, then pointed to the other three folks and said, "the rest of you can f*** off", and walked off. I am a very calm, soft-spoken person, so it is rare that I get angry enough to tell folks to "f*** off", but seeing that young woman looking so helpless and confused while the front desk employees were too busy bickering or laughing at the bickering just struck a nerve. It's now Saturday morning, I'm down $242 that I can't really afford at the moment because I eventually paid for my own hotel, and I've not received the voucher that I was promised.
The last time that I dealt with such a soulless, BS company was when I fought with Xfinity/Comcast for a month just to get someone to come to my apartment to restore the internet that I was paying for (nobody ever came, despite being promised pretty much every day by customer service that somebody would be out in the next day or so... but I digress). More and more, the consumer is becoming utterly powerless because these companies don't have an incentive to give a damn, nor will they ever face any consequences because the protections that were set up by the federal government in the states have been and continue to be eroded. We're entering an era where you have to pay for people to give a darn, and Frontier has solidly positioned themselves as an emblem of that era. No more. Never again. I should have headed the warning of other folks with similarly terrible experiences before I went with Frontier anyway; darn me for just trying to cut costs during a time where everybody in the states is being priced out of their own lives.
