Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II),  here (Part IIb), here (Part III), and here (Part IV)

Wherein Our Hero Fights for $100 at the Heart of the JetBlue Contact Center

I got an agent after a few minutes on hold — maybe five or six, but now that I was in full meltdown mode it seemed like a thousand, compared to the instantaneous service I had received before.

When an agent picked up, I hurriedly gave her all my information, asking her, desperately, if my flights were in order and if I would ever be able to leave Rochester (which more and more seemed like a prison of sprawling greens and rivers). The agent assured me that I did have a flight booked from Rochester back to Florida. She added, however, that I had missed a flight from Florida to Rochester a couple hours back and would now be levied with a $100 penalty fee.

Turns out, the agent who had booked me before had correctly added my new flights, but she forgot to cancel my old ones. Originally, I was supposed to go to Florida first and then Rochester, but due to a scheduling conflict had to switch the trips. Now, I found myself effectively double booked. I explained this to the agent and asked what could be done. Right away she canceled the remaining flight from Rochester to my next destination, Washington, D.C.. Still, however, the $100 fee remained. I pressed her on that and told her to go ahead and look at when I booked the flights. She could see for herself that I had called the second reservation in 20 minutes after the first. Clearly, my story checked out.

“Hold on,” she said. She had to check the terms.I held on for a good long while. She came back and said she needed to speak to a manager. Waiving the fee was above her pay grade, but she would try to see what she could do. Most of the explicatives that were running through my head were not even English.

They were akin to that kind of mumbling that Yosemite Sam does when he’s real pissed at Bugs, has blown off all his bullets, missed every time, and thrown his pistols to the ground in a hissyfit. You know the kind of cursing I mean: Frakas, frikas, I’ll git that sonvarichus, smagus, bagus…and so on. That’s about where I was when the agent came back.

Good news and all praises be. The fee was to be waived. The woman apologized for the mix-up and wanted to know if there was anything else she could do for me. As the tension started to subside, I realized all would be in its place and just how polite and helpful she’d been.

It took her some time to get the authorization to waive the fee, but she hadn’t really given me the business about it. There was no third-degree interrogation. She instantly saw the problem and took the steps to fix it. In a lot of ways, just the sheer politeness and professionalism of the agent not only cushioned the fact that JetBlue had made a mistake in the first place, but made me have faith that if the airline made any further mistakes (which can happen to any firm) it would probably fix those, too. Given how wretched some other airlines are about that sort of thing, this may prove to be a serious leg up over the competition in my mind.

I told the agent there wasn’t anything she could do for me, but that I was a reporter, and would likely be working on a story about my experiences with the company and that I was mightily impressed with the service JetBlue’s agents offered. She thanked me just as mightily (and perhaps even more genuinely). Maybe she even made a note of the fact that I was a reporter in her log. That’s what I was hoping for, that I’d mysteriously be granted more legroom on all of my remaining flights in some kind of subtle effort to bribe me into boostering JetBlue to the hilt.

Sadly, however, that didn’t happen. It seems no one wants to bribe me — or they’re so subtle about it that it goes unnoticed, which makes it either a lousy bribe or a massively successful manipulation. My life, it would seem, is a graftless tundra, bereft of all kickbacks and fringe benefits suited to a man of my office and station. Ah, well.

In any case, it’s interesting to note that, as this agent was running through my flights with me, making sure they were in order, she was having to ask me for information about each of them, one by one. From the way she was asking me questions, it seemed like she wasn’t able to see all the flights I had booked at the same time, which, given how many flights I had booked all at once, might explain why the original agent made a mistake in the first place.

I can’t imagine that on most days JetBlue’s contact center has to process a dozen flight reservations from one customer in one go, so the system probably isn’t designed with that in mind. However, the conditions of the All-You-Can-Jet pass were asking it to do just that. It will be even more interesting to see, looking ahead, if JetBlue makes any changes to its contact center in response to the promotion.