Customer Service

I'm half–tempted to start a whole–new Blog dedicated to customer service.

Friday night, Courtney and Amber embarked on their first–ever trip without any adult supervision. Okay, that's not entirely true, but they would be spending 2–1/2 hours in an airplane by themselves. They were flying Allegiant Air out of Lansing, Mich. The whole story is an adventure itself.

We arrived early (around 5 p.m.) and were informed that "because of weather heading directly at each other" the flight was delayed about four hours. The option would be to divert the flight from Sanford (supposed to leave around 4:30, I believe) through Houston, TX, and hope that it would avoid the dreaded storms. We told the counter person, Eric, that we were going to go to a movie and we would be back.

"Well, security closes at 9 o'clock so be sure you're back before then."

We also wanted to grab some dinner, so a movie was probably out. We went to the Lansing Mall, visited the world's greatest bookstore, Barnes & Noble, a few more stories in the mall, and then Best Buy. The best deal ... I bought seasons 5 and 6 of Seinfeld for $16.99 each. Of course, it's not really a sale, it's SPEND (that's a completely different post).

We ate dinner at Damon's. The service was BAD, the food OKAY, and the TV show ... scary. We watched CNN as they broke information about the computer glitch on the East Coast that was affecting air traffic.

I'm no conspiracy–theorist, but when one place tells you it's weather and the news is reporting there's a computer glitch, I start to wonder why the U.S. Government really wants everyone out of the air...

Anyway, back to my original post. The customer service at Allegiant Air was excellent. Damon's was lousy. Then, Levitt writes this great piece, so check it out at the Freakonomic's Web site.