Christine (my wife) is on her way back from a trip to New York.

Her experience on the flight out (Delta Airlines):

• Got to the airport at 5am for a 6:15am flight on Delta.
• The airplane sat on the runway for ~3 hours with a mechanical issue.
• The flight was cancelled.
• She sat in standby queues on two more flights.
• They sent her home at 2pm, then asked her to come back for a 10pm flight.
• She got to New York about 16 hours after she was scheduled to arrive, causing her to have to rearrange plans.

Her experience on the flight back (USAir):

• Got to Newark for her flight to Seattle via Phoenix, scheduled arrival 11pm.
• Flight was delayed by one hour.
• They cancelled the Seattle to Phoenix section. There were no more flights during the day (this was an evening flight) so they sent her away.
• This morning she got to La Guardia for her new flight to Philadelphia, then to Seattle. Scheduled arrival 10:30am.
• They cancelled the Philadelphia flight.
• The new trip goes La Guardia -> Boston -> Las Vegas -> Seattle (as I write this she is in the air to Las Vegas) with a scheduled arrival into Seattle of 2:30pm.
• Her scheduled arrival is 18 hours after the original one, and is probablycausing us to miss the signing for our mortgage refinance.

The airlines negligance costs flyers money (over $100 in this case, but for a traveller staying in hotels this would have been hundreds of dollars). As flyers we have no rights when it comes to cancelled flights if we haven’t left the source airport. USAir isn’t responsible for getting Christine from Newark to La Guardia or putting her in a hotel for the night. For all of this hassle she doesn’t get anything.

For years I’ve been trying to keep my vacation time close to home (hence going to Ross Lake this summer) and this is just a reminder of why. We have a trip coming up soon to Kauai and I hope that our flying experiences are a little better than what Christine had this last week.

I’d like to say that I’ll just avoid USAir and Delta from now on, but it doesn’t seem like there are any “good” airlines that don’t get into these messes.