Nick Fish is Stuck in New York and He Isn't Happy

Nick Fish is Stuck in New York and He Isn’t Happy

 
9:26 AM December 28th, 2010 by Hank Stern 
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Nick Fish

For those of us not lucky enough to travel on the holidays, here’s an update on the vacation of one Portland city commissioner.

Commissioner Nick Fish was scheduled to fly back to Portland with his wife and two children from New York last night after visiting his wife’s mom in Westchester County. But as you might have read, snow has paralyzed travelin New York City and along the East Coast. So Fish called this morning with one Portlander’s tale of weather woe—his own—and his anger at JetBlue. Here’s his story:

Fish checked JetBlue’s web page Monday morning to see if his family’s scheduled 7 pm flight out of JFK was still a go. He says the flight was still scheduled with an hour delay.

Armed with that information, the family piled into their rental car for what Fish called an “incredibly treacherous drive” from Peekskill to the Dollar Rent a Car, about a 45-mile haul that took them a couple hours.

When they made it to the rental car dropoff spot, a Dollar worker was kind enough to drive them in a van the extra mile to the airport because the bad weather had killed any hope of taking a bus from Dollar to JFK.

When they arrived at the JetBlue terminal, however, all was chaos, Fish said.

Despite what JetBlue’s web site had reported, all flights had long been canceled and the airport shut down. Fish waited with his family in a line at the airline counter of what he estimated were about 300 people. About three-and-a-half hours later, he got to the counter to learn that nobody from JetBlue had been able to update the website and that the airline’s next available flight was Jan. 4—a week away.

“Why did we have to wait three-and-a-half hours to find out we’re out of luck?” Fish said.

As it turns out, a town car driver took Fish and his family into New York City and they found a hotel in the West Village to bunk for the night, with tickets now secured for flights home Friday on Delta. Meantime, Fish asks, “Whatever happened to customer service?”  

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