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 ...