The email from the client was not quite panicked, but it was accusatory. I ticketed her two months ago on KLM flights from New York to Amsterdam, on KLM, with the best nonstop and least expensive nonstop schedule. Delta couldn’t find her reservation.
While I told her that she couldn’t upgrade the discounted ticket with miles, she decided to call KLM to find out, since she had “tons” of Delta miles and knew they were alliance partners.
The only problem was that the old KLM phone numbers now ring into Delta reservations. (They used to ring into Northwest reservations, but now Delta has taken over both airlines.) When she told them her flight numbers, the Delta agent couldn’t find a reservation. So my client assumed we had messed up the JFK-AMS ticket, or charged it without following through on the ticketing. Needless to say, I heard from her.
Fortunately, one advantage of tighter airline reservation policies these days is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often. If a travel agent makes a reservation and doesn’t ticket within, at most, a few days, the airline cancels the flights and sends a message.
In any case, I had sent her the record locator on the invoice along with the e tickets. I suggested she try to find the reservation using the record locator, because my computers were showing that her e-tickets were valid. The client replied indignantly that she had tried that on a second call and the airline said still she had no booking.
So, I got on the phone, found a competent Delta reservations agent and gave them the locator and the e-ticket numbers. This agent found the KLM booking with no problem.
The agent did advise me, however, that because they were KLM flights (and KLM does still exist, even though all Northwest planes have been painted over to Delta), that the system didn’t always pull such reservations up cleanly, especially if a caller was talking to an inexperienced agent.
She advised me that if the client wanted to talk to Delta in future, to have her ONLY give the ticket numbers, and the reservation should be easy to find for any agent. Interestingly, she punctuated the advice with some less than flattering comments for some of her fellow Delta employees.
(Indeed, when the client did indeed call Delta a third time, using ticket numbers, I think this time to check up on me when I said things were fine, the agent found the booking.)
I’ve written in the past of why you should keep e-ticket numbers handy because they are the easiest way for an airline to pull up any reservation, although this Delta-KLM issue should really not have been that difficult.
On the other hand, there are plenty of complexities. The new Delta now encompasses Northwest, KLM and many different commuter carriers. Not to mention code shares on Sky Team members like Air France and Korean Air.
So besides having an e-ticket number, it’s also a good idea to read your itinerary very carefully to be absolutely sure which airline you are flying on. In this case, KLM and Delta are in the same terminal at JFK so a mistake at the airport would probably be easily fixed, but that’s not always the case – United and Lufthansa for example, are several terminals apart.
Also, when talking to an airline agent, the more information the better. Had the client pushed the fact that it was a KLM, not a Delta booking, she may have been able to get the agents to dig a little harder.
In any case, the merger between Delta and Northwest has actually gone relatively smoothly, but this incident is a reminder that relatively doesn’t mean much if you are the one having a problem.
