Spending hours on hold with airlines? Here’s why and what you can do.

 I overheard a man telling the bartender about his latest travel woes around 7 p.m. at a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport restaurant.

"Delta kept me on hold for hours," he explained. "It's almost as if you don't want my business."

I might not have noticed the conversation if I hadn't recently experienced the same thing with Delta and American Airlines. My wait time to reach airline customer service agents had ranged between two and twelve hours the week before.

Thankfully, major domestic carriers allow you to leave a callback number, so they can call you when it's your turn instead of keeping you waiting the entire time. The only issue is making sure you don't miss that return call — which I have done several times because I mistook it for spam.

So, why is it so difficult to reach a customer service representative right now? And what if you need to talk to one right away?

"Basically, long wait times are a fascinating confluence of a lot of disparate issues," said Scott Keyes, founder of Scott's Cheap Flights and author of "Take More Vacations," who recently spent seven hours over two days trying to get assistance with his mother-in-law's tickets for a trip to Ukraine.

One of these issues, according to Keyes, is that airlines are in the process of making significant scheduling changes. This has been happening throughout the pandemic, but now that airlines have added a large number of flights to their summer schedules to meet rising demand, they are having to make changes based on factors such as the number of pilots or crew members available to work those flights

"Every time they change the schedule, you'll have a significant number of people who were booked on the original flight with a new flight that doesn't work," Keyes explained. "They'll require assistance."

According to Keyes, factors such as the significant increase in the number of people flying, as well as the fact that more vacation and leisure travelers are flying right now, all contribute to longer wait times.

"On average, these travelers will contact the airlines more than a business traveler who is experienced and knows what to do," Keyes said.

The national labor shortage is also not helping. Delta Airlines are scrambling to hire more call center agents and baggage handlers, "and that's really coming to a head right now with travel picking up," according to Keyes. Customers are seeing the consequences of under staffing not only in issues such as customer service wait times, but also in long delays in receiving their luggage.