Delta Airlines and their Greece bureau

[John]

For the past few years, I've traveled to US using Delta Airlines. Never had an issue with them, nothing exciting to write home about. So this year, when I booked my tickets for the SHOT Show, I used Delta again. Then a couple of days ago, I went to their web site to book myself a seat.

I always prefer aisle seats during those long travels, so imagine my surprise when I noticed that the only seats available in the plane (the flight was due about 10 days later) were middle seats, all "D" seats. For those not familiar with the Boeings used by Delta on this flight, they come in an arrangement of 2-3-2 seats per row. The "D" seat is the middle seat in the three-seats middle section. No window seats, no aisle seats AT ALL. That was for the Athens-to-JFK flight. In all subsequent flights (JFK to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to JFK and JFK to Athens again, there were plenty of differnt seats to choose from.

Now, this may be normal for US, where people are used to book their tickets and seats on-line, but for Greece, where less than 12% of the population have a computer and much less have Internet access, didn't exactly looked right. So I called Delta in Athens, like I've done in the past. Only this time, there was an Air France call center that answered my call. It appears that Delta has partnered with Air France/KLM here in Greece (or possibly in all Europe). So the agent I was speaking with told me that, yes, that's the way it is, there are only D seats available. "Some seats are reserved for distribution during check-in" she added.

So let me see: while everywhere else in the world, airlines prefer people to book their tickets on-line, reserve their tickets on-line, even check-in on-line, Delta in Greece, prefers me to stand in a queue to manually check-in and get the aisle seat I want.

How clever is that? Who's the genius behind this decision? I never had this problem before, so I have to assume that this is a decision of their handlers in Greece (Air France and KLM).

Needless to say, I wrote to Delta and complained about this, but haven't heard back from them yet.

I'll keep you posted when I hear from them, if I hear from them.

[Hawkmoon]

If you got an Air France call center, you may also be taking an Air France flight. This comes about through what the airlines call "code sharing." Airline 'A' wants to be able to sell tickets to Atehns from JFK, but they know they won't have enough business to fill a plane, so they get together with airline 'B' and they both sell tickets on the same airplane ... each through their own reservation system, and each using their own flight number.

We discovered this by accident when booking my wife from JFK to Santiago. I have a travel agent who has been a friend for many years -- I dated her when I was in college and we have been friends ever since. In this case, my friend was on vacation and her partner booked us. We specified LAN Chile and that's what we got -- but it turned out to be a 4-digit flight number rather than 3, and when we arrived at the LAN Chile counter at JFK they sent us to the American Airlines terminal. The flight was on American.

And it was a disaster. We vowed that we will never EVER again fly American Airlines. Which is sad, because I used to have friends who were highly placed in American and it was my airline of choice. Things change.

Let us know what's painted on the side of your aircraft. And get to the airport early so you can swap your D-row seat for one of those check-in reserved aisle seats.

[John]

I do not think so. Air France doesn't fly directly to JFK or anywhere else in US from Greece. I guess this alliance has more to do with sharing flights within Europe.

But yes, I'll let you all know, even though Spyros can tell us before me. He got the same flight, although on a different day, I think he flew out on a Wednesday or Thursday.

And yes, I plan to go early, I hate sitting in the middle seat or the window one.

[Spyros]

Sorry I'm so late...

The flight IS a code-sharing flight, but not with Air France: it's with Olympic... but Delta and AF are both members of Star Alliance, so they probably share ground handling services whenever possible. The plane was a Delta aircraft with a very polite Delta crew.

If you tell the lady at the counter that you want an aisle seat, she'll probably be able to offer one... a nagging lady in front of us cajoled the staff to get an emergency-door window seat. We had D and E seats, but at least the legroom wasn't an issue: an important factor on an 11 hour flight! Width, for my rather large posterior, wasn't too bad either.