The world's worst Airline?

As promised, I am sifting through the hundreds of terrible customer service stories sent to me by people all over the globe. Here is a doozy:

From "Tippy"

My husband and I just returned from Loreto, Mexico on 3/12/07 flying on Delta/Atlantic Southeast and it had to be the worst travel experience we have had, and we've traveled a lot.

We flew from San Francisco to LAX on 3/6/07, Delta cancelled our flight and rerouted us onto United. This caused our luggage to miss our connecting Delta flight from LAX to Loreto so we had no luggage for the first two days of our trip. Although inconvenient, this seems somewhat minor compared to three other passengers that were travelling on the same flight and had chartered a fishing boat and lost all their gear on the same flight.

We thought that after we finally received our luggage that it was a one-time event but we were sadly proved wrong. On our return trip we arrived at the Loreto airport to find that their computers were all down, they had no record of our return flight or the ability to print our boarding passes.

After waiting at the ticket counter for 45 munites they finally printed our tickets and we were able to board, at which point we sat on the runway in Loreto for an hour. The Delta ground crew insisted that they print a Gate Manifest for our flight, unfortunately their computers were down again and this delay caused us to arrive 45 minutes late at LAX. Our connecting flight was out of LAX at 6:05, we arrived at 5:25.

We had to get through Customs, re-check our luggage, go through Security and get to another gate in less than 20 minutes to catch our connecting flight to San Francisco. Delta provided no gate info (what they printed in Loreto was incomplete and incorrect); they had noone at our arrival gate at LAX to direct us to Customs or to our correct gates; noone at the Delta LAX counter knew what was happening or what we should do.

We finally managed to re-check our bags after Customs, get through Security, and we ran to the gate. We were the second to last people to board.

Upon arrival in SFO we went to baggage claim only to find that we had no luggage! We were not alone, there were two other parties that had traveled on the same plane with us from Loreto and they had no luggage either. However, one woman who was the last person to board after us in LAX got all of her luggage.

We filed our paperwork with Delta baggage and left the airport. Delta told us that the luggage would be delivered to us by the next day at 12:00 P.M. We waited until 4:00 P.M. the next day, no luggage and we started calling Delta. We checked the website and we waited. Each time we called we got a different story, our luggage had been delivered, our luggage was in LAX, our luggage was on an American Airlines flight, the stories were endless.

By Wednesday, March 14th! I called American Express to see if they could help through Global Assist. They too got a run around as to the whereabouts of the luggage. No one seemed to know what had happened to it.

At 8:00 P.M. that night I recieved a phone call from a courier service asking me where I wanted my luggage delivered. The two bags were delivered at 12:05 A.M. on Thursday, one bag was very damaged and the other bag had been gone through and had several items stolen.

Delta has refused to repair the damaged bag and claims no responsibility for the theft of contents and has not accepted any responsiblity for any of the incidents cited in this post.

I am an American Express Delta SkyMiles Platinum card member. I have lost all faith in Delta and as soon as we use our miles I am cancelling my membership with them.

I'm posting this because I want other travelers to know what a terrible experience this has been and how poorly Delta has handled it.