FRESNO (KMJ) — Ongoing problems for Frontier Airlines, are having a knock on affect on a Central Valley couple who had their honeymoon abruptly canceled.
Hanford High teacher John Burns was due to fly out of San Francisco International Sunday night with his new wife, to catch a cruise on the East Coast. But after hours of delays, he says there were few answers.
“They kept delaying the entire process, not telling anybody what was going on, everybody was coming to the front desk around 3 o’clock in the morning – yelling and getting angry”.
He says police were called in to calm the situation.
“They pretty much canceled the flight on us, at 3 o’clock in the morning. They were not going to give us a voucher for a hotel, food, or any kind of transportation to get back home.
“The only thing they were allowing us was to reschedule for another flight, or you get your money back”.
But the next available departure would have arrived too late for them to make the cruise ship before it left.
“We don’t get to go on our honeymoon now…all [the airline] could tell us was ‘oh well, we’re sorry'”.
Frontier told CBS Denver that they’ve had delays and cancellations prompted by bad weather. Issues like that can have a knock-on affect elsewhere in the country.
But that’s little comfort for the newly married couple.
“We spent all this money, and now we have nothing to show for it”, adds Burns.
On their Facebook page the airline apologized to all those who have been affected by the winter weather, stating that “we made several tough decisions to cancel and delay flights, and we understand that this is a big inconvenience to our customers”.
In reply to a request for comment, KMJ News received this response from GroundFloor Media working on behalf of Frontier Airlines:
- First of all, we want to apologize to customers who have been affected. We’ve been working hard to fix the operation.
- Our focus is repositioning both crews and aircraft that were stranded. DEN still remains Frontier’s largest operation with the largest number of flight attendants and pilots based here. We had large numbers of them who were stranded outside of Denver over the weekend, and many were scheduled to operate flights from Denver to somewhere else. In some cases, we had a plane but no crew to fly it because of the weather.
- For example, we had a plane in Las Vegas to fly to Cleveland that was originally scheduled to be flown by a DEN-based crew. The crew was unable to get to Las Vegas so the flight had to be cancelled. We’ve been moving both crews and planes yesterday and today to get them into position.
- Because our crews can only legally fly for a certain amount of time, many of them “timed out” and were unable to continue on their trip. Our crew schedulers have also been working hard on getting the crew timing back on track.
- About 275 flights were cancelled system-wide the weekend.
- About 70 percent of flights experienced a delay system-wide over the weekend.
- We certainly empathize with the couple, and we are disappointed for them that their honeymoon flight was impacted by snowy and sub-zero weather conditions. In terms of their specific flight delay, it was caused by weather conditions that disrupted our ability to provide service.
Hear the report from KMJ’s Dominic McAndrew as it aired:
