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 Air travel with Spiritair and American Express
Posted Thu October 23, 2008 2:52 pm, by Peter H. written to American Express Company
Write a Letter to this Company
We have run into a situation which has really lowered my opinion of American Express. We used some of our considerable mileage through your travel dept. That mileage is the result of our using American Express as our primary credit card which I believe we will now change due to the following.
We booked a flight on July 7th through American Express with Spiritair nonstop from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale leaving Los Angeles Dec. 21, 2008. The purpose of the trip is a cruise we are taking out of Fort Lauderdale on the 21 Dec with another couple. Spirtair only allows booking of seats and prepaying baggage on their web site and we found this site giving us constant errors at this time though the friends we were traveling with were able to book their flight immediately. The error explicitly said if it was consistently happening to call Spirt for help. After multiple attempts for a week we did call Spirtair and were told we could not book till 90 days prior to the flight though our friends had again booked immediately. They had no explanation for that. We waited till within the 90 day window and again tried several times with the same error. Again called Spirtair who told us they couldn't help us as we had to book online. We talked to a supervisor and got the same answer without any explanation as to why we were getting the error. We spent hours on the phone with Spirtair unable to book seats or prepay baggage. Finally after all this time we were then told by Spirtair that because American Express had made the reservation for the flight that they also would have to book the seats and prepay the baggage. This is when we called American Express for help and here we received primarily what I would call lip service much like Spirtair. American Express would put us on hold and then forward our call to Spiritair. We actually were on hold for over an hour once and finally hung up. Once, an American Express agent named Phil told us we couldn't book until within the 90 day window. He called back and left a message on our answer machine "Hi, this is Phil from American Express, hope you got your seats.... Any problems give me a call". He left no contact information at all so we were not able to get back to him as we still had no seats. Another call to American Express travel after the Phil experience resulted in being told by your agent that he would book the seats and prepay the baggage and get back to us. We gave him our American Express card number and never heard from him again. Following this we contacted Spirtair once again now in desperation and were put off by their saying we now would have to book within a 60 day window. Mind you at this time the Spirtair site stated a 90 day window. We received the same errors when trying to book within this 60 day window. On our last call yesterday to Spiritair they asked for the specific error which I gave them and their response was they had only a limited amount of knowledge about the website and could not respond to the error as they didn't know what it meant. Note when the error comes up it specifically says to call Spiritair to solve the problem
Bottom line is American Express who has always been helpful in the past has now joined the rank of businesses who no longer really offer support on services. American Express offers mileage with different airlines and to tie in with an airline like Spirtair which treats its passengers like dirt is something I believe you need to deal with. Spirtair in this situation says we can now book seats 24 hours prior to the flight and that there will be seats. If we can't book them now why would be able to book them then. Also, we won't be able to print a boarding pass. Not even sure because of this we could book seats directly at a counter and we are over a 3 hour drive from the airport we are leaving from. Their site professes how important it is to pre book seats and baggage and then they tell us this! After this experience we are to believe that we will have seats. This is 4 days before Christmas and we have a cruise connection to make so if the flight is overbooked we could get bumped which I'm sure you're aware that this has happened before. Also, on this cross country flight my wife and I would like to sit together and there again would be no guarantee that we could do that either. Lastly, the outsourcing to save money on American Express and Spiritair is extremely counterproductive as they are unknowledgeable and frankly you get the feeling that they could care less. We may have to make other arrangements to get to Fort Lauderdale as if we get bumped off this flight we then lose a considerable amount of money on the cruise we'll miss. This has been a hellish time consuming nightmare for both my wife and me with countless hours spent online and on the phone with American Express and Spiritair. We definitely will start changing our charging habits with American Express having been our primary card to another of our cards becoming our primary card. Over the years we've spent between our business and personal millions of dollars on our card and this situation has left us quite disappointed with American Express. Obviously, we will never fly Spiritair again and believe with the current economic conditions that companies should be much more accommodating in order to keep their business and their share of the market. The pertinent information to this will not be posted here, flight info, card number etc. as this is a public letter. However, we did send a letter directly to American Express and emails to Spirit air about a month ago regarding this mess without a word of response.
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