Crappiest airline ever- Go! Airlines

Crappiest airline ever
Originally uploaded by grache23
Sneaking in a rant about the crappiest airline ever, Go!Airlines, so I can stop thinking about them. I recently took a trip to Kauai, HI (blog post coming up soon) and it would have been perfect except for the Go! experience. Go! Airlines is a small carrier in Hawaii used for inter-island flights. We got them as part of the air package that Expedia (which also sucks by the way) booked for us (those tickets didn't come cheap!). The fact that they had to charge us extra money to deliver paper vouchers to us for that part of the trip should have been an indication of this flight fiasco. I have been traveling for years and have used loads of smaller carriers but have never experienced such inefficient and crappy service such as this.

Because of Go! Airlines we missed our flight to LAX from Honolulu. This is despite the fact that we checked in almost 5 hours before our connecting flight and despite repeated inquiries to the Go! staff at the gate counter about time of departure. They did not even make an effort to announce that our flight will be delayed we just knew to be proactive because other flights before us were getting delayed. So of course we missed our flight since we got to Honolulu with only less than 10 minutes to take the slowest shuttle in the world to our next terminal.

I was so livid when I found out that it was the last flight back to LA. Thank god United Airlines had excellent customer service and was able to rebook us a flight back the next day. The only problem was we had to find a place to sleep. When we asked to talk to the supervisor to see if they can book us a hotel it took forever to get to talk to him. He was nice enough to call up the manager to get approval but that conversation lasted less than 5 minutes because the manager immediately said no. There were other passengers stranded and so we waited to see if any of them got any service. NADA. We were left to our own devices.

So of course, the horrible experience did not stop that night. The next day after a long flight back we find out that Go! did not hand off our luggage to United. $&@#(##!!! Right? Again United had great customer support and handled everything after we filed a report.

I am writing this post because when I tried to call customer care to see if I can give them a piece of my mind their recording pointed back to the Go! website and then the line immediately went dead. WOW! I wanted to sucker punch something right then and there. It's like someone intentionally putting down the phone on you. It was that annoying and THAT frustrating. Obviously, they did not want to be bothered by the multiple complaints about how crappy they are.

So moral of the lesson: never fly GO! Oh, and online travel sites don't always know best so the least you can do is do a quick research on smaller airlines you haven't heard about before pressing that Submit button.