Complaint Review: Delta Airlines/Susanna Curtis - Nationwide

 Delta does not use Sabre as a booking system. Sabre and worldspan are used by travel agencies, and some other airlines. Delta uses a completely different and separate program.

You state, "this is a perfect example of why you should Never book through a travel agent only through the airline directly. As if something goes wrong each company will blame the other one." It seems you agree there was an issue in my instance, precisely the reason I am alerting others. However, I would never say you should Never book with a travel agent. I generally use a different travel agent for tickets than the one I mentioned above and have never had a problem, so I don't have the confidence you have in assuming there would necessarily be a blame game if something went wrong. And yes, we arrived at the airport over 2 hours early and at the gate over 1 hour early. The boarding passes indicated we only had 1 assigned seat (not 4), for our minor aged child. And that is precisely my point. The boarding pass does trump any printout with assgned seats a traveler may have. Thank you for stating this. They did ask for volunteers to give up their seats, and they were 1 short. We were either going to travel entirely as a family, or not at all. Delta did make an effort to get us to Greece, and put us on a plane to Paris. We were going to sleep in the airport for 6 hours, then take a plane to Athens. Then Delta bumped us from that flight also, but our luggage did make it to Paris. We did take a flight 24 hours later to Athens from jfk, but the 8 hours wait in Athens for a flight to Santorini was much longer than it would have been had we made our schedulaed connecting flight to Santorini 24 hours earlier. So in essence, we lost 2 out of our scheduled 3 days in Santorini, as well as a prepaid, very expensive hotel in Santorini. Some months later, we did get some partial money back from Delta, but our trip was really ruined. It was hard to relax and enjoy ourselves. And if money was more important than the trip, then we would have taken this trip to begin with. Things would have been a little better if Delta customer service person Susanna Curtis was a little nicer on the phone and did not yell at me (as if this was my fault) and hang up. And I did obtain some weeks after our trip a computer printout from Sabre, the reservation system Delta uses. I saw each of our names with assigned seats on the printout. Delta claims they never got it. Scary, if you ask me.  

There is some key information missing here as according to what you want us to believe you arrived at the airport and at the gate on-time and they basically told you to go "Pound Sand" without getting you on another flight or getting your money back for this ruined vacation.

But there is a lot of key info missing.  In order to get to the "gate agent" you would have had to have your boarding passes as that is the only thing that will get you through TSA.  Those will display your seat assignment as well and basically trump any other "printout" you would show.  So why when you got to the "gate agent" are you talking about some reservation confirmation?  What did your boarding passes show?

You also have to be at the gate at least 10-15 minutes before the scheduled departure.  If you are not there by that time the airline has the right to reassign your seats.  So what time was your scheduled departure, and what time did you arrive at the gate?

I don't think you can actually ever book "standby".  If you followed all of the times and by no fault of your own are still "Involuntarily bumped" you should be entitled to Denied Boarding Compensation.  Yet you failed to mention anything about this. 

Did you arrive at the gate early enough?  If so did you hear them ask if anyone volunteered to be bumped? 

You also talk about booking through a travel agent and showing a confirmation.  I have actually never heard of that travel company, but how do you know that they actually passed this information along to Delta?  BTW this is a perfect example of why you should NEVER book through a travel agent only through the airline directly.  As if something goes wrong each company will blame the other one.  Had you booked directly with Delta they couldn't palm you off to anyone else. 

There are just too many unanswered questions here.  As it seems as if it may be Delta, Liberty, you, or a combination of any(or all) three.