Another Delta Moment

Today's adventure was to ship a beautiful Solomon Island Male baby to Pat in Harrisburg, PA. Everything went smoothly on check-in. We were over two hours before flight time and the clerks in cargo were great. Delta Cargo in New Orleans has four great cargo workers, one b**** who just happens to be a woman, and a manager named Bill who specializes in avoiding confrontation by not managing.

At two o'clock I got a message from Pat (not Delta) that the flight out of New Orleans had been delayed and his baby missed his connecting flight in Cincinnati. We agreed that he would call Cincinnatti cargo to make sure that the baby would be on the next flight scheduled to arrive in Harrisburg four hours after the original flight. You see, Delta doesn't know if a pet missed a flight because their tracking system is usually hours behind. They don't notify you of a problem because Pets First doesn't do anything other than make reservations. Their tracking department has no special procedures regarding live animal shipments.

Because of the delay and the fact that the baby was most probably left out in the heat for a prolonged period, I recommended that he be sensitive to dehydration. He said he was planning to bring water and an apple for the ride home. We question whether Delta has formal policies regarding pets being left on tarmacs in the heat. We suspect that it is left to the discretion of individual workers at the terminal.

Why do we use Delta at all? We do not believe that Delta's poor quality Pets First program will result in the death of a pet. We do think that they are misleading the public by having a Pets First department when they are just reservation clerks. They also cause undue stress in both the shipper, recipient and the pet. Given a choice we always use Continental's Pet Safe program which is the model for all good pet transportation programs.

Update: 9:00pm, Bird arrived home safely after 12 hours in transit.
- posted by J-Birds @ 7:00 PM |