Anybody ever write to an airline after a bad experience

My buddy and I lost a day of vacation to Phoenix two weeks ago because of two flight cancellations out of Milwaukee. One was a 5:15 p.m. flight Monday, then the rescheduled flight-which we had upgraded first-class tickets on-which was at 7 a.m. Tuesday. Ended up having to backtrack to Detroit on another airline and didn't get to Phoenix until late Tuesday afternoon, which caused us to miss a Brewer game we wanted to see.
It was a pain in the ass. I'm writing the airline. Should I ask for a free ticket (which I feel is justified) or should I just assume they'll issue one?
Anybody else ever do this?

Writing to the airline is basically a waste of time.Although I have never done this I know of several people who have for legit complaints & it was a complete waste of time

I've written multiple times with all I've flown. It all depends on the reason for the problems and I can only speak for what I've seen on Delta.

If it was a weather delay, you will get nothing from it. If it was mechanical delay, you could get something for it, but the likelyhood of getting "free" tickets is almost zero. If it was Delta, you would end up getting a voucher for around $50 if you had no status, $100 at Silver/Gold, $150 at Platinum and $200 at Diamond.

The feeling the airlines have is that if you HAVE to be someplace that you need to give yourself more than a reasonable period of time to get there.

From the sounds of it, you most likely flew from Milwaukee to Detroit then on to Phoenix on Delta Metal, since Detroit is one of Delta's hub. The other question here is was Delta the originally scheduled carrier, or were you on United/American or any of the others and got transfered to a Delta flight? If you were on another carrier, again not knowing their policy, they may believe that by interlining you to DL they held up their contract of carriage.

It doesn't hurt, but understand if you go to normal "customer service" you are much more likely to be denied anything than if you go to the office of the president of the airline. If it's Delta, PM me and I'll give you Richard Anderson's (President of Delta) snail mail adress to send the complaint out.

Either way, who-ever you send the letter to, MAKE SURE you cc the FAA on it and make sure you send it in to them. You've got a much greater chance of getting something that way.

Baccy, it was U.S. Airways and it was an engine light that went on probably due to a faulty sensor. They thought they could fix it overnight but couldn't. I wasn't upset about the initial cancellation, but felt they were obligated to make sure the rescheduled flight went off. Thanks for the response.

Same thing happened to me last year. Missed 1 day of vacation, but was given a $5.00 lunch voucher. Yes, $5.00. A few years back they over booked my flight and I was separated from my family. That time we got 2 free tickets.

arniesarmy said:

Baccy, it was U.S. Airways and it was an engine light that went on probably due to a faulty sensor. They thought they could fix it overnight but couldn't. I wasn't upset about the initial cancellation, but felt they were obligated to make sure the rescheduled flight went off. Thanks for the response.

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I've got no contacts at USAir that I can give you to send the letter to. IMO the best bet is to post as much detail as you can about the flight (day, flight#, etc) on Flyertalk.com (MODS - sorry about posting about another forum but it's not a sportsforum) in the US Airways section and ask there who to write and how much to ask for. When you ask who to write to, make sure you say you want to avoid normal customer service and go up the foodchain with the complaint - somebody will post-up the correct contact information for you.

I can post-up the information there as well for you if you want me to. If you go there with just 1 post you might not get a response, but I've got over 500 posts there and have been on that forum for a while so I should get an answer from somebody - just PM me the specifics.