Difficulties Flying Delta from Smaller Cities

I am a 70 year old man with quadriparesis traveling with a Yorkshire Terrier in a softsided travel carrier, an electric scooter and a collapsible manual wheelchair.

I started trying to find out what I needed to do to travel on April 2, 2016, on the morning of Thursday, March 24 because I was traveling with my little Yorkie. I checked with the TSA at McAllen, TX, airport to make sure they would accept the collapsible pet carrier I was using. They couldn’t comment on the size but did tell me about the process for getting through TSA with the dog. Because Delta does not have a physical presence in McAllen, TX, I had to drive to Harligen, TX, to find out if the travel carrier was approved for my flight to Minneapolis, MN. Delta didn’t have anyone at the check in counters until approximately 4:00 pm. Since it was noon and I would have had to wait for 4 hours I left the Harligen airport and drove back to Pharr, TX, (which is adjacent to McAllan and where I live in Texas) and called the Delta Disability Assistance line.

I learned in my conversation with the Delta Disability Assistance representative on Thursday, March 24th that:
1. When I made my original reservation in January I should have alerted Delta that I was traveling with a pet and should have notified Delta of this fact. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any notice of this when I made my online reservation.
2. The pet carrier I had bought and was training my dog to was 1/2″ too high. I then ordered a new collapsible carrier. I did consult the specs for the pet carrier I had bought previously and believed it would be accepted by Delta. But when the rep identified the equipment (Delta CRJ 900) being used she told me the kennel I bought was too high.

When I made my reservation for a 1st class seat I picked seat 1A, because it was the 1st seat on the aircraft and therefor easy to transfer into. On 11:18 April 1, I checked with Disability Assistance about the need for a health certificate and to ensure the reservation also noted that I was traveling with a pet. They said no health certificate was needed (it was not needed for carry-on pets) and there was a notation about the pet on the reservation. At 14:35 the same day I attempted to check in and found that my seat assignment had changed from 1A to 3C, which meant I would have to climb over a seat to get to 3C. I called 800-221-1212 and got a recorded message informing me I could expect a call back 53 mins to 1 hr 23 mins. Later, I then called the Delta Disability Assistance line at 14:52 and talked to a rep who told me seat 1A was a bulkhead seat and the pet carrier needed to be placed under the seat in front of me. He apologized because I hadn’t been informed of the seat change. He changed the seat from 3c to 3A, which is an aisle seat, but upon boarding I found out the arm doesn’t lift up to facilitate a transfer which no one knew about at least I didn’t have to crawl over another seat.

Because I was traveling with a pet I had to check in at the ticket counter and pay the pet fee, I couldn’t get a boarding pass online. In addition to traveling with my pet in his carrier, I was traveling on my 3 wheel scooter, had a collapsible manual wheelchair, one large suitcase on rollers and an iPad and man purse. When I told the Delta staff at that the counter I wanted to take my scooter to the flight check in station and then transfer on the bottom of the jetway to an aisle chair. They said I couldn’t because they couldn’t get it down to the cargo hold. Even though there was an elevator up to the flight gates, I had to transfer to one of their manual chairs. Unfortunately the staff at the check-in counter meant, but didn’t tell me, was that they couldn’t lift the chair down the stairs and couldn’t bring the chair down in the elevator because it would have had to be scanned again before being placed in the cargo hold.

Boarding the jet (Delta CRJ 900) was difficult because there was a high threshold from the boarding ramp and the aircraft. Getting seated was difficult because the armrest couldn’t be lifted up which would have made a lateral transfer easier.

At the Delta check in counter in Harlingen, TX, I told the Delta staff that I wanted my scooter at the jetway in Minneapolis so that I could transfer onto the scooter directly from the aisle chair so I wouldn’t have to wait for additional assistance. They told me they would do this.

During the flight I told the flight attendant I wanted my scooter available at the jetway, she said this would be taken care of. On arrival and after all the other passengers had disembarked, the captain told me that my scooter was being retrieved and was going to be brought up. After transferring, with great difficulty, to the aisle chair and being taken into the jetway, the captain told the attendants to take me out of the jetway because it was cold down there and exposed to the elements. They took me up into the terminal while I waited for my scooter.

After waiting patiently for my scooter the Delta gate agent and a baggage handler came to me and told me because the scooter was tagged with the wrong color tag, the scooter was going to baggage pick up. They told me the agents in Harligen had tagged my manual wheelchair and scooter with a white tag when in fact the scooter should have been tagged with a yellow tag. I asked the two Delta employees how I was supposed to know the difference between a white tag and yellow tag. I was extremely angry about this because this was the type of situation I was trying to avoid! As I recall neither of the Delta employees apologized for the inconvenience this was causing me! They just kept telling me the Delta folks in Harligen, TX, made a mistake.

The individual who had helped me getting off the plane then had to take me to baggage pick up. This is exactly which I had wanted to avoid.

In the past before the merger of Northwest and Delta I always traveled on Northwest and never encountered any problems. If at all possible in the future I will avoid traveling on Delta.