Remember the days when after your flight landed, you could walk out of airport gate and straight into the arms of smiling and welcoming family members? Well, security measures have made that impossible in this day and age. And if that was even possible, last weekend, those family members awaiting your arrival were likely to have been taking naps in uncomfortable terminal chairs, waiting hours upon hours for you to arrive. Flight delays and cancellations due to weather woes, made easy pick-ups from the airport virtually impossible.

Passengers wait for a delayed flight to Seattle at Los Angeles International Airport.

Analysis indicates that this was the worst holiday travel season in years. Today, airline performance watchdog FlightStats.com, released numbers indicating that nearly 8,800 flights were canceled between Friday, December 19th and Sunday afternoon on December 28. A week ago Friday, winter weather conditions led to airline delays up to 10 hours. Flights across the country were canceled and the entire Milwaukee airport closed due to incessent snow fall.

I experienced this chaos firsthand last Friday as my flight home for the holidays from Newark to Kansas City, connecting in Milwaukee, was canceled. I wasn’t able to fly out until Monday night — and still experienced delays on top of that. Despite the misfortune, I was home in time for Christmas, which is what really mattered. And, I surprisingly had very good experiences with my airline’s customer service hot line. Sure, I had to wait up to an hour when calling, but once an agent got on the line, I was greeted with a friendly, helpful, and understanding representative. I must have called the reservations line eight or ten times over the course of the week. And really, each time, I talked to an informed and understanding person.

I’ll admit it, I was emotional over the phone. At several points in time, I raised my voice declaring how a three-day delay wasn’t fair and wasn’t right considering the price I paid for the ticket. Still, the agents held their patience with me, talking me through reasons for the delays and every option possible to get me home to my family. One particular agent spent 50 minutes on the phone with me, trying to work out the best flight to put me on. She even looked into me taking a train to Philly to then catch a direct flight home. Now that is going above and beyond her job description. Under no circumstances did I feel like they were trying to get me off the phone. I kept thinking, “It’s a good thing that this contact center doesn’t use call times as a success metric…”

In person at the Boston airport yesterday, I experienced another bout of excellent customer service. Earlier in the month, I received an email from my airline saying my flight itinerary had changed. Well, that change resulted in me switching airlines mid-trip and also left me with a 10-hour layover in the Boston Logan airport. So, on Monday I approached the airline ticket counter to ask if there was any way to fly standby to NYC on an earlier flight. Unfortunately, she told me, that all the flights were overbooked and it probably wouldn’t be a possibility, yet there was a flight to another New York airport leaving soon that she could try to get me on. It turned out to be a difficult task. She had to reroute my luggage, which at the present could not be located. I watched the agent pick up the phone four times to ask favors from baggage claim workers. She even made a call to the workers at the gate asking that they hold the plane for me while they located my luggage. She didn’t make any changes until the manager from baggage claim came up to the counter in person with my bag in hand.

I was frankly shocked and a little puzzled by this woman’s effort to help me get back to New York a little sooner. As I stood at the counter for 25 minutes, the line of passengers waiting to check their bags grew exponentially. I heard grumbling and from the looks on people’s faces, they were not happy that I was receiving such lengthy treatment. The agent behind the ticket counter was determined to make the change happen.

She apologized for the delay repeatedly, admitting that the system for giving seats on flights is flawed. Often agents are told to overbook flights, resulting in even more chaos when boarding occurs. Basically, the system is broken. If it weren’t for experienced — and caring — employees, who knows if I would have made it anywhere during the holidays.

Air travel is heading down a downward spiral. I watched as airline representatives argued with upset passengers about outrageous baggage fees, carry-on requirements, and seating assignment changes. On one occasion, I witness a flight attendant try to convince a passenger to sit in a broken airplane seat because the flight was oversold and there was nowhere else to sit. The employees know some of the practices are harsh. As one agent over the phone told me, there is very little they can do. There are too many passengers for too few flights. There are too many flights scheduled for too tight of a departure schedule. Fuel prices are too high and airline tickets are too cheap to cover the difference. Due to these chasms, poor customer experiences emerge. And from there, low employee morale is bound to surface. Lucky for me, I found employees who seemed to still care about helping people with their travel. But does a friendly customer service agent really make up for a three-day delay in my holiday vacation? Not really.