Terminal Hell In Phoenix

This complaint covers all categories – airlines, airports, and personnel. The incident happened at Phoenix. If you have a choice, do not go there. Especially, do not change flights there in the middle of a summer day!

We arrived from Seattle on Alaska Air. We were supposed to catch an American Airlines flight onward to Dallas, and then to our destination.

Alaska Air arrived at the United terminal. Our first priority on arrival was to look for location and departure time for our connecting flight. We saw that all the monitors with departure information were turned off, and only the arrival screens working.

(Note to Phoenix Airport Staff: Arrival information at this location is not very helpful. The people who come to meet arriving flights are far away, outside the security area. The passengers in the security area are either leaving the airport, or trying to get on another plane. The passengers with connecting flights want to know where to board that flight, and when it departs.)

Our next thought was, no problem, we will find the information in the American Airlines terminal. Any other airport I can think of has signs posted to give directions to the different terminals. We looked, but there is none of that all the way from the arrival area to the front door of the United terminal in Phoenix (and were were definitely looking for it!).

We were able to find out from a janitor that American Airlines is in a different building. To go from the United terminal to the American terminal, you have to go outside the security area, outside the building, to a center island in the street and find a bus that will take you to the other terminal. On this day it is probably over 100 degrees. My wife and I are in our late 60’s. I am fairly fit and can take some heat. My wife has bad knees and reacts poorly to heat. We reached the center island and walked about 50 yards to the nearest bus. Here we got another nasty surprise. The buses are dedicated – a given bus will travel to only one terminal. We would have had to walk over 100 yards in the opposite direction to catch the dedicated bus for the American Airlines terminal. This driver, however, made an exception for us and gave us a ride to American Airlines.

Another nasty surprise at American Airlines – they had cancelled our connecting flight. I had confirmed this flight about 24 hours prior, but had no warning from American Airlines. They did arrange another flight for us – on Continental, and informed us that we should collect our baggage and take it with us to Continental Airlines terminal. (This later turned out to be a good thing, as one of the airport staff was found to be systematically stealing large amounts of luggage).

So it’s out in the sun again, this time hauling all our luggage to find another bus to take us to the Continental terminal (I think it was in the same building as United).

Continental would not accept that we had already paid for our checked luggage, so we had to pay again (and more about this later).

So we are booked on a flight and we go to the screening area. All the people we had met up to this point had been nice, or at least polite. Here is where we met the gratuitous meanness.

The TSA screening process here is in two phases. In the first phase, they check your identification and ticket. In the second phase, they check your luggage and person for contraband.

The TSA personnel in the first phase were polite and helpful, almost friendly. There were a lot of people being processed through phase one. All these people were lining up at the entrance to the room where phase two would take place, waiting at the rope barrier. Initially there were no TSA personnel in the room where phase two would take place. One of the TSA people from phase one even came back and looked into the area to “see what is holding things up.” After several minutes, all the phase two personnel filed into their area and took their places, but did nothing. Would-be passengers and TSA personnel looked at one another for several minutes (possibly as many as five) until one of them finally stepped forward and opened the rope barrier.

The contraband check begins with the passenger placing bags, shoes, pocket items, etc., into plastic trays. I don’t know if there is some fixed rule as to where the various items are to be stowed, or if it was all in the mind of the woman overseeing this operation. Whichever, she obviously had requirements which the passengers would have to learn by trail and error or by mind reading. The procedure went as follows: pile your stuff in the trays, walk away, get called back, hear one requirement, rearrange your stuff, walk away, get called back, hear second requirement… I was able to complete my lab rat test in two tries. The woman behind me was not so lucky. When I looked back later, she was in tears and screaming at the “tray master” (who never lost her smirk, and was obviously deriving pleasure from the process).

I felt that it was American Airlines’ fault that we had to pay double to check our luggage through to the destination. After all, they canceled the flight and caused the problem. On arriving home, I wrote them a nice letter and explained the situation and asked them for a refund. They refused to pay it, and offered a time-limited discount on some future flight with them (which we are unlikely to use, as we do not travel all that much).

Tagged as: airport, american airlines, delay/cancellation, security