From bad to wurst

Question: My wife, children and I arrived at LAX at 6:30 a.m. for an American Airlines flight to Kauai that left at 8 a.m. We were directed to an automated check-in machine, which after 15 minutes in line told me I had to check in with a human because we had a stroller. By the time we got to the counter, it was 50 minutes before departure, and it was too late to get our boarding passes. We eventually got on a 5.30 p.m. flight to Lihue after a difficult nine-hour wait. Why did this happen, and what could we have done?

Tim West

Los Angeles

Answer: As near as American Airlines can figure out, West misread the prompt on the kiosk. If you’re checking bags or what the airline calls “assistive devices,” such as strollers or wheelchairs, it instructs the customers to check with an agent -- not to check in with an agent.

“He was one screen from being totally checked in,” said Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines, also noting that the airline does not charge a baggage fee for strollers.

Should we blame the machine?

“The scenario seems to be a training/customer service issue and not a kiosk/IT issue,” said David Wakeling, manager, product management for Amadeus IT Group, whose Altea Departure Control solutions integrate and run departure operations around the world.

“There are a number of areas where we are developing additional functionality to improve the passenger experience, including, for example, using kiosks to manage information transfer, to enable changing flights, to support requesting upgrades or other added-value products.”

In the future, things may be easier for kiosk users, but what about now?

It comes down to being practical.

I once had a coffee mug that pictured some dancing sausages captioned with this line: “Hope for the best, but expect the wurst.” The pun may make you groan, but you have to admit there’s a little travel gem there. Things happen when you can least afford them to, and that is exponentially increased by the number of people traveling with you, especially if some of them are under the legal voting age. If American suggests getting to the airport 90 minutes before boarding a domestic flight (and it does), I’d add 10 minutes more for each person who’s traveling with you.

The next bit of wisdom comes from a more credible source than a coffee cup. Andy Abramson, the chief executive of Comunicano Inc. in Del Mar, Calif., flew a quarter-million miles last year and was on the road 300 days the year before that. His mantras: “The traveler has to be assertive without being aggressive” and “It’s about attitude” -- yours and the person you’re dealing with.

Abramson said he would have firmly but politely asked for a supervisor. “If you panic and yell and scream, the gate agent will say, ‘I don’t really care -- that’s not my problem.’ ” Instead, he adds, try to enlist the agent in helping you solve the problem.

If this strategy had worked, West might have well been smelling sea breezes instead of stale air on the first day of his vacation, which was, clearly, no vacation.

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