Piss-Poor Customer Service: Asking for Compensation

Life Lesson #20: Making your complaint work for you…and never assume everyone is potty-trained

I was on a flight many years ago where a gentleman with one arm situated himself in the row behind me.  A woman sat down beside him and after exchanging a few words, he said, “I guess we aren’t going to argue over the armrest.”

People never cease to amaze and entertain me.

In sharp contrast, on a more recent flight with my family to Maui, I found myself far less amused with a fellow passenger.

The Story: Approximately halfway into this fateful flight, I left my aisle seat to use the lavatory.  During this time, my wife observed a young woman unexpectedly take my vacant seat and slowly slump over the armrest.

My concerned wife leaned across the aisle to check on the woman, but she was unresponsive.

Moments later the woman got up and walked to the rear of the plane. That is when my wife noticed a puddle of liquid on my seat and that the woman’s leggings were also wet the entire span of the inner and backside of her legs.

Suffice it to say, she had urinated on my seat.

Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

Unfortunately, my distress call to the flight crew went unanswered.

Almost more shocking than my soiled seat, the flight attendants showed surprisingly little concern for this appalling situation.  Moreover, they were even reluctant to provide adequate supplies to help mitigate the problem. Not only did I have to clean up the urine-soaked seat without any assistance from the flight crew, I practically had to beg for something to sit on to create a barrier between my body and the defiled seat, for which they finally offered a plastic bag.

The Breakdown: The more I thought about how poorly the airline handled the in-flight drama, the more pissed off I got (no pun intended).

In hindsight, upon landing I should have spoken to a gate agent about my terrible experience.  Instead, I decided a pointed email to Customer Service was my next best play.

I thoughtfully expanded on the flight details, highlighted my previous positive experiences with the carrier, and described how the current situation left me disgusted and disappointed.  Finally, I closed with how I knew the airline was “better than this” and that I felt it important to inform management of this regrettable experience.  I thought it was a well-crafted complaint.

However, I had failed to do one very critical thing – tell them what I specifically wanted to remedy the situation.  Absent this request, I left them guessing what compensation would satisfy me, to which they offered a sympathetic reply and a $125 discount code (redacted email below).

As I reflected upon prior overbooked flights, where travelers were offered much larger sums to volunteer to rebook at a later time, I began to feel less positive about the airline’s meager offer. After all, these people volunteered for the inconvenience – without having to endure cleaning up the revolting bodily fluids of a stranger.

I ultimately countered their offer with a more specific and aggressive number.  In the end, they increased the discount code value to $200. While not exactly what I was hoping for, it didn’t seem worth getting into a pissing match over for an additional $50 or so.

As I’ve shared this story, the speculation has been the woman was either inebriated or stoned, and that it was simply my bad luck she had found my empty seat to plant her backside on. Or maybe it was the Universe’s way of inaugurating my vacation in a similar way a new ship is launched with champagne on its maiden voyage. In either case, we will never know the true motivation.