Don't fly Delta

I am blogging this from JFK airport in NYC in the middle of one of the worst travel experiences of my entire business life.  The last few years after the analyst event we have had our fair share of troubles getting out of Laguardia, so this year we decided to try to get out through JFK.  BIG MISTAKE.
Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7:20 PM.  It’s now 11:20 and we still don’t know if we are going to go anywhere.  A short synopsis of what has happened so far:

• 7:10, flight gets delayed to 7:30 – no announcement as to why
• 7:25, flight gets delayed to 7:45 – no announcement as to why
• 7:40, flight gets delayed to 8:10 – you guessed it, no announcement
• 8:00, flight gets bumped to 8:05 – there is hope!
• 8:01, obviously was an error, gets bumped back to 8:30
• 8:25, flight flashes to canceled.  We head up to the Crown Room where they tell us they can’t rebook us because it’s not canceled on their screens  They can’t get through to the front desk so we have to walk back down to the gate, where indeed it is not canceled.
• 8:30, flight gets bumped to 9:00 – since they are on a streak there is still no announcement.
• 8:35, now the run around starts.  They move us from gate 23 to gate 25.  This pattern will reverse and repeat at least 6 times over the course of the next 2 hours.
• 9:30, flight still shows departing at 9:00 and I ask one of the gate agents who says “it’s going to be canceled”, so once again we head up to the Crown Room.  This time a very unfriendly agent re-books us on a 7:05 AM flight out of JFK to Washington Reagan that gets into Cincinnati after 12:30.  Not optimal, so we try to call Delta special member services.  No dice.
• 10:00, we start looking for a hotel.  Closest available is in New Jersey…45 miles away.
• 10:10, finally update departure time to 10:15.  Yeah, like that’s likely.
• 11:30, flight is finally canceled.  Of course it is due to weather (even though it stopped raining and lightening here over 2 hours ago).  No help rebooking and no help getting a hotel.

Coal Miner’s Daughter full

I am done with Delta.  I have over 500,000 miles on them and I was flying to Boston on them next week.  Not any more.  Since 90% of of the flights out of CVG are on Delta, I will really have to go out of my way to make it work, but they have my last dollar.