Southwest Airlines is finding out
that there are some screw-ups that can’t be atoned for with a free
flight voucher. At the top of that list: misplacing an elderly
passenger.85-year-old Alice Vaticano says
she sat abandoned in a wheelchair in Newark International Airport after a
skycap — who was supposed to roll her to her gate to catch her
Southwest flight home to Denver — instead abandoned her somewhere in the
airport.
“She pushed me there and left
me,” Vaticano told Denver’s KCNC-TV about the skycap. “I was just
sitting there all day… I didn’t even know where I was.” Vaticano, a diabetic, was in
Newark after visiting a daughter. Because of the skycap’s error, she
says she missed her flight home. When KCNC asked Vaticano what she
feared would happen to her, she said, “That I would sit in Newark
forever.”
In Denver, Vaticano’s other
daughter, Donna, was understandably worried when her mom didn’t get off
the plane. She contacted the airline.
Southwest did eventually locate
Vaticano and put her on a flight home. But while Vaticano says she sat
in the airport for 11 hours, the airline says it had noticed the error
within minutes of Vaticano missing her plane, and had her back in Denver
only four hours behind schedule.
Still, the airline acknowledges
the mistake, blaming the mixup on “ a processing error in that check-in
process.” The airline’s giving Vaticano “our heartfelt apology” and $200
worth of vouchers for travel with Southwest.
Related: #GetOut: Man Allegedly Kicked Off Southwest Airlines Flight for Tweeting Complaint
This has been a bad summer for
Southwest. A month ago, the airline once again made national news after
its employees pulled a man and his kids off a flight after he wrote a
complaint Tweet about a gate agent (the man and his kids also got
vouchers — $50 each).
This time, Southwest points out,
the error was not committed by one of their employees. The airline says
the skycap that left Vaticano is not employed by the airline.
Maybe so, but that’s a
distinction without a difference as far as Vaticano’s concerned. When
KCNC asked her when she plans to use her new vouchers for another
Southwest flight, she responded: “Any day now… never.”
