Fly the not-so-friendly skies

I agree. Next time I go to a restaurant, I’m going to clean the table myself, go in the back and do the dishes, and then cook the meal myself. Heck, I should probably hit the grocery store first and bring my own food. Because as the customer, that’s my job.

Then I’ll politely pay my bill and leave.

-xtien

Don’t forget to leave a tip.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I once had a flight delayed because the pilots hadn’t arrived yet, but none of us passengers flew the plane. So it’s our fault, because of our attitude.

Really, why defend it when a faceless corporation that is in the business of delivering no better than the least bad experience they can fucks up like this? They were wrong, they should apologize and make restitution, and they absolutely will, because they know they were wrong.

I’m with scott on this one.

A-frickin-men. You can dislike the victim mentality while also acknowledging that some people are actually victims.

Well when you guys all gleefully sit in shit covered seats on your next flight, please send pictures and be sure to rub your hands all over it before you get your free drinks too, videos of that might be necessary.

Wait, which Scott was kerzain “with”? I’m with scottgibson, not Scott123 who blames the flyer for complaining.

Oh. You’r right. There two Scotts in here. The other Scott sticks out more because of the capital and the simplicity of his name.

My apologies.

Not sure if I should push my angle forward here, as at the end of the day, I’m saying this is mostly exaggerated slights and a click-bait story. I don’t think the crime is worth the effort it’s taking us to debate. I’m not victim-blaming, I’m saying the guy was offered to find another flight, declined, and he got 50 thousand miles, so everyone could just move on.

But cranking up the rhetoric is the internet way, right?

We don’t really need to use an example, but if I arrive at a restaurant and the table is dirty, I don’t post “shaking, upset, I’m a repeat customer! Unacceptable!” to Twitter. More specifically, if I arrive to an airline seat that is dirty, I’d probably do what this guy did, and sit on a blanket but then take the 50,000 mile compensation and move on in my life, rather than threaten ‘legal action’, contact the media, and draw the ire of the general public, after he elected to stay on the plane given a choice.

See I find this interesting because your frustration with a flight delay shows through because of things out of your or probably the airline’s control. But, delaying everyone on this flight, possibly cancelling the flight and re-booking passengers / overnight delays (clearing the plane with a bio-contaminant-trained crew was suggested up-thread) is preferred in this situation.

Remember the poop wasn’t bad enough to even notice, upon arriving at the seat and sitting down. The only photo we have is a smear on the bottom of a shoe. No-one else noticed the poop. It probably looked like dirt. The plane had been cleaned and inspected, and they elected to fly onwards.

Poop is pretty gross. It’s also produced by every person and animal on this planet. I personally am not ‘terrified’ of poop. I’d rather not it be in my seat though. 50,000 miles for a staned seat, and sitting on a blanket, seems ok.

Keep piling on me though, the shameless defender of the faceless mega-corp!

He was only offered the miles after he complained. The flight attendants didn’t offer him anything in return for sitting in shit.

As for not taking another flight, I agree with you there. If it were me, there’s no meeting in the world that would cause me to sit in shit. Deboard the plane and call your boss, tell them the flight got cancelled and you’ll do the meeting from your phone.

Not the appropriate comparison.

If you arrived at a restaurant and they refused to clean the table and seat you, or gave you a dirty glass and told you to drink or leave, you could absolutely share your experience. And in both those cases, you have not already paid, in advance, for acceptable servucde. This guy already paid for his seat. That’s his seat. It should be clean to the best of their ability to keep it that way before that flight. You’re acting like that’s an unreasonable demand… but it’s what he paid for.

Also, this the airlines, there might be a small chance in hell that he gets off that plane and they actually get him on another flight, quickly.

There is no way that refusing to clean up a seat with shit on it is somehow the customers fault or that responding the way he did is somehow extreme. Delta did not respond well to this situation at all. Bad things happen all the time all day long and most people don’t actually take to the Internet to spread their lack of joy when the company responds in a mostly reasonable manner. Delta didn’t do that.

Flying sucks, and the number of times I’ve seen problems on a plane is… well it happens a lot. But this wasn’t something out of their control. All they had to do was clean the seat, the row, maybe the rows around them, whatever their standard is. Seating flyers in shit covered seats is not their standard; I guarantee it.

I don’t think the reference here is necessarily ‘Delta’. We’re talking about a a single overworked stewardess dealing with a crammed back of the plane, families, kids, carry-on that doesn’t fit, people that can’t find their seat. He or she offered a couple of options and yeah, maybe could have been more professional about it. But, should she have stopped helping the family board and jumped over the toddlers, onto the seat, and scrubbed the heck out of it and begged his forgiveness? They really do have a job and schedule that does not involve taking breaks to clean seats.

Again, we have no information other than the guy’s account as to how bad it actually was, and he himself elected to stay on the plane, in the same seat. And as I mentioned up-thread, he wore a white suit and yet the only picture we have is the smear on the bottom of his shoe. It just doesn’t sound… that bad.

If I was on this plane a 30-minute to 12-hour delay for cleaning multiple rows of seats, would seem unacceptable to me, given the context I have that he still chose to stay in the seat. We haven’t heard much from other passengers about just how bad this was. What about the person sitting directly beside him?

Also ‘Delta’ seems to have responded pretty favorably. They issued an apology, explanation, and compensation. Not sure what else they could have done.

Horseshit. There is not a flight attendant in the world who would ask that question. This coming from someone who has been Platinum or higher on AA for about a decade now and is closing in on 1,000,000 miles…and is leaving his house in 20 minutes to catch a flight from RSW.

First of all, I don’t know why she would have to jump over people to get to his seat. If she’s doing that, he’s already done it, so presumably she’s already at the seat. She handed the guy paper towels, so it’s not really an if it’s there, and she’s employee. 100% of the time when those employees engage with their passengers, their clients, they represent the company.

You read the article right? You saw the part where they took the airplane out of commission to clean it. They knew there was problem.

Upon landing in Miami, the aircraft was taken out of service to be deep cleaned and disinfected.”

They thought it was such a “minor” issue that they took plane out of service to deep clean and disinfect it. As soon as the plane landed, they magically knew what to do… but somehow managed to let the people in that row, the guy on the seat, and everyone on that plane leave without an apology, and during the incident no ounce of caring. Delta, the company that these employees represent, failed multiple times until it hit social media.

I bet if you paid $300 or $500 for a reservation at a restaurant and arrived to find it covered in filth, you’d be pretty pissed off. And if the waiters told you that you either had to deal with the dirty table or leave and come back in a few hours, you’d be AMAZINGLY pissed off.

And as noted by others, they didn’t offer him anything except a later flight at the time… presumably without the reschedule fee? No refund, no apology, no miles. Only after he raised a stink about it did Delta offer him anything for his trouble.

I have some sympathy for the flight crew here. Delaying a flight is a pretty big deal and can cost the airline a vast sum of money and lead to all sorts of questions to whomever made the decision to delay. I have to imagine that the flight crew chief is heavily incentivized to do whatever they can to keep everything on schedule. What they should have done is to grab some guys, a mess of cleaning supplies and scrubbed the area as best they could before taking off. That they didn’t is amazing.

There’s much we don’t know here. The airline says that the flight “was boarded before cleaning was completed following an incident from a previous flight with an ill service animal.” So it sounds like it was not cleaned or inspected… or at least not well.

That said, we don’t know how much shit was there. The passenger claims that it was on the seat, floor and wall. My guess is that the previous passenger cleaned up the big chunks with paper towels, but that there were wet streaks that they didn’t/couldn’t clean… probably in the fabric of the cushions.

I don’t fly a lot, but when I do there is a long line of people behind me pressing me to get seated. I don’t do much more than glance at my seat in the dim light of the plane’s lights before sitting down. I’d see a huge turd nugget, but not a brown smear on the dark fabric.

Oh for gods sake @Granath. It was a paraphrase. I recall it specifically, it was night-flight over the Atlantic, and I got up to walk around. I was chatting with the flight attendant at the back and asked her how often she did the flight. The answer was something like “we do four legs a week”. My response was “huh, I think I’ve taken eight flights in the past week.” She said it was a lot. Take it easy.

Reasonable points, same with @Tin_Wisdom. My guess is that corporate news releases, in the event of a bad news event such as this, need to be crafted to minimize perception. Reading about this some people would naturally wonder “geez, what happened to the airplane?” and start wondering if that’ll be their seat. By stating that it was taken out of service and deep cleaned, they’re planting the seed that the issue was an oversight that has since been fixed.

If you were a frequent traveler then you would never, ever defend this because you would never accept it yourself. There is not a frequent traveler who would not mind cleaning a dirty toilet in a hotel room or happily jaunting down the isle holding a used diaper they found on their tray table. The more you travel, the more someone has a reasonable expectation of service (which includes cleanliness). It is those who do not travel whose expectations are generally far too high or too low. Much like yours, incidentally.

FAs do far more than four legs per week unless they exclusively work on trans-Continental, long-haul flights. Most unions have 12 hour maximum days (14 if needed) so a FA who worked 4 per week would have to exclusively work trans-continental flights (one day there, the next back, etc.). To get that gig, that means they have worked their way up through the system through the domestic flights. Many FAs work 6 or even 7 legs per DAY if they are domestic. They would have paid their dues, so 8 legs in a week is nothing to them. So that is why your story holds no water - any FA would know better.

So continue to defend the indefensible but your claim to authority holds no water. Now I have a flight to catch.

I don’t mind your effort to outgeek me in terms of travel cred, you can win this medal because travel for work pretty much sucks. Congrats. After spending my points which I had built up, I’ve now stopped using my points card completely and have ZERO intention of ever making ‘elite’ again. I miss the lounges :).

But I mentioned I had this conversation on an international flight, and you basically are saying ‘no you didn’t’. Good luck with that.

Finally - 'if you were a frequent traveller you would be an enormous snob and Tweet out when you are ‘‘shaking, upset’ over a seat with poop on it’. Sorry. I don’t get that mad over things. I might get ‘shaking, upset’ if the airline poured gas on me and lit it, or on my kid. Other than that, to me it’s all “people trying to do their job”, sure some of them not so well but hey, their job isn’t that great and they’re just trying to get through the day and pay the bills too.

Edit: just for a fun segway - I’ve been on a flight (in the past decade) that someone smoked, and rather than complain I personally just sat there hoping no-one else complained, because I’d rather the flight not get diverted. I’ve also been stuck on the tarmac for four hours while the ground crew duct-taped a hole in the wing. No tweet storm.

You’ve travelled a lot, let’s hear your horror stories too - probably have some good ones.

ITS LITERAL FUCKING SHIT

What fucking planet do you pretend to live on?

Your examples aren’t even in the same fucking galaxy. Jesus Christ.

“A dude smoked once, that’s the same as sitting in feces from a sick animal.”
No. Not even remotely.

“I might get angry if they LITERALLY MURDERED ME AND MY CHILD but anything less than that is fine.”

Bullshit. Just complete and utter bullshit on every fucking level.