I love my Delta. Sure, there are days they drive me totally nuts, but then there are days like my trip home that I just love my Delta oh so very much.
I shared food and such photos and info from the trip over in part one so will not go on about that today. I did want to share a few of the GOT Skyteam lounge side photos to compare to the Star Alliance side from last trip.
Seating is good and comfortable, but they could learn a bunch from Delta about more power ports as they are lacking!
Food and drinks are good and well stocked. I do like the open “feel” of this side much better.
One of my biggest gripes is regional service. No, not Delta regional, KLM regional. I like the planes, the seats and the food is OK. The flight crews are very Dutch and professional. But what drives me just batty is the lack of Sky priority boarding. GOT is the worst. They do not even have a SP line for boarding and never announce business to board first ever! AMS is not much better as they have SP lines for intra-Europe but as soon as they announce boarding everyone lines up in the standard and the SP line and we all muddle onboard. As hard nosed as KLM is on upgrades etc., you would think they would be the same way about SP. I tweeted BOTH @KLM_US and @DeltaAssist about this and have not had one word back, so a bit disappointed after how good they have been but for now rant over!
The food over the pond was not just good, but very good I would say, with fun flavors that I would not have ordered in a restaurant. I find that very kool and invigorating to have such pallet stimulating food along the way! As I talked about before, I was initially booked on a horrible set of connections until schedule change occurred. But then a bad schedule change happened – sorta. I ended up with a 4+ hour layover on the way home in DTW. Now I could shower in the Skyclub etc. but at this point in the trip all I want to do is to get home and that kind of layover is not fun but torture. But I looked at all the options and asked, due to this latest change, to be routed from AMS to SBN via ATL rather than DTW so I could go see the new terminal as I blogged about last Saturday and Delta said sure.
Now the aircraft to DTW was an A330 that I do like, but going to ATL we ended up with a 767-300ER with the old seats (You can look at this post to see my review of DL/AF/KLM seats). Many flyers feel these seats are worse than an iron maiden torture device! Truth be told, as an “awake” flight they are just fine. For work and lounging they are okee dookie! The IFE, well, it did not work on our flight at all no matter how many times the great Delta crew tried to get it booted up and working. But the result was I learned something Delta I never ever knew.
(the voice inside your head needs to be the bacon dog voice)
“You know those little hand held units they use to process payments when you buy a drink?”
Yeah… yeah… the little payment thingees ….. yeah…
“You know what else they can do?”
No, what?
“They can also be used to input your name, and your Skymiles number, and then have either Skymiles awarded to you or ETV’s for a list of issues that may have gone wrong on the current flight!” 🙂
Obviously one should not abuse this, but if we have a legitimate issue in-flight compensation can be issued right away and a receipt printed out for you to take in hand. Lisa and I were given some miles for the IFE issue for missing “dinner and a movie” on the flight. For points back, I can always go to the movies when I get home.
So if you are keeping tabs, this trip could have cost us 650,000 Skymiles for the flights I picked, it initially cost me 200,000, but ended up even less that that in the end! – Rene
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will you share how many Skymiles they “rebated” you?
I’m sorry, but this article is way too positive for having such a bad experience- a 767 without IFE? And pretending that you got a deal from 650,000 to 200,000? Why not be more objective and realistic, comparing the actual product with other intl prodcuts that are infinitely better for the same point value.
For 100,000 miles you can fly business class on a Star Alliance carrier such as Lufthansa and receive much better value.
@jb – 100k each, less after rebate, is a good deal when skymiles are so easy to get. 🙂
I had a BusinessElite seat that wouldn’t fully recline on the 747 NRT-ATL. The flight attendant tried to fix the seat and to no avail. They wrote of the problem to get fixed by groundstaff when we arrived. They offered me either 5,000 miles or $100 voucher. I obviously took the $100 voucher. I then wrote in to customer service from their website portal about the problem and also about how polite and accomodating the flight attendants were. They awarded me 19,000 miles. If you really want to get compensated, you’re better off writing into Customer Care from their website. Some data points: At the time I was a Gold Medallion and flying on an Award ticket (MIA-ATL-NRT-BKK-NRT-ATL-MIA for 180,000 in BusinessElite)