Why Frontier Airlines is incompetent

Things always seem to start out so smoothly. Start out. But not when it comes to Frontier Airlines.

On Saturday, I was booked to fly from Washington’s Reagan National Airport on a mid-day flight to Milwaukee. I know. Wisconsin in the winter. Yeah, yeah, but I was scheduled for visits to several campuses, including some classroom lectures, along with catching up with some folks, and a quick jaunt over to the State Capitol for the 39th notch on my state capital building belt.

Note that I say I was booked.

My ticket on Frontier Airlines had been bought and paid for. The boarding pass for flight 321 had been printed out the day before the flight. I arrived at the airport around 45 minutes before the departure, and proceeded to the TSA screening area, and then the gate. Getting through the TSA security went quickly, as it should on a Saturday morning.

But to my surprise, once I sat down in the seats outside of the scheduled departure gate, and then connected with a gate agent, i was told the gate had closed 25 minutes prior to the departure time, and flight 321 to MKE had taxied away from the gate, and was in line for flying out of Washington.

This was news to me. An airplane leaving early. And not a full international flight leaving two or five minutes early, but an undoubtedly empty domestic carrier taking off a full 25 minutes prior to the scheduled departure.

Now, before you get all up in arms about this, understand that the gate agent said he had paged me. No, didn’t hear a thing in the terminal. No, didn’t hear my name on the overhead. No, I frankly don’t believe that he paged me. And further, he said he paged me once. Haven’t we all heard individuals paged more than once when planes are about to depart. Wouldn’t an air carrier want to insure that a passenger would be on board, particularly when that passenger was already booked and provided a boarding pass, complete with seat information?

Apparently not.

And how legitimate is the use of an overhead page for a passenger. What if that passenger had hearing issues. Or what if that passenger was engaged in conversation with a TSA official, or another representative of the airlines, or the airport authority, or anyone else for that matter, and was temporarily unable to hear a page.

To me, this defense doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Nor does the response of the gate agent to my dilemma, and my request, which was to get me to Milwaukee that afternoon.

His response. No. Not gonna happen. Not on Frontier Airlines. After all, I was told, it's your fault.

I was told there were no other Frontier flights to Milwaukee that afternoon. I was told, but only after I asked for options on Frontier through other cities, that there were no guarantees that I would make the 20 minute connection in Kansas City if I was put on that flight (d’uh), and most significantly, was told that I would not be allowed to be placed on a flight out that afternoon on any other carrier because it was my fault that I missed a flight that left the gate 25 minutes prior to scheduled departure.

That’s right, it’s my fault the airplane left early, without me. It’s my fault the plane left without me, even knowing that I was slated to sit along the window in 12A that afternoon. It’s my fault that I placed trust in a carrier I had previously not flown, and undoubtedly will not fly given the way this matter has been handled.

Well, we’ll see. It is possible that i am the only air passenger ever put in this position. I am the only one I know of, but I suspect Frontier has acted in this cavalier way with others. Perhaps even on this flight, on other Saturdays. Who knows. If it happened to me, it may as well have happened to others.

If you’ve got a similar story, let me know. I will gladly add this to the mix in what will likely be an interesting discussion with Frontier. I would like Frontier to reimburse me for the cost of my ticket. It would be even more responsible for them to reimburse me for the one way cost of the ticket I purchased on a competition carrier. Let's see if they step up, acknowledge the error in this unusual gate decision, and provide a satisfactory response.

Wish me luck.