February 8, 2007
My negative words about Continental
As already mentioned in my high-lights section for Continental, I was once a frequent traveller on their US services into and out of Ireland. A few years ago, I found a web site reviewing different airlines called http://www.airlinequality.com and destinations and when reading reviews about Continental in/out of Belfast and Manchester, I read some really bitter reviews from people saying that the plane that was used for these destinations was a Boeing 757 with a 3 X 3 configuration with one aisle up middle. You can imagine my chagrine when I went to book a Continental flight a few months after reading this and when I went to select my seat just before hitting the purchase key, noticed that the plane was a Boeing 757 and not the B767-400 that I had come to expect (with the seat back tvs at every seat). I immediately backed out of my transaction and telephoned the Dublin office of Continental and asked for a clarification as to whether they had indeed changed their equipment and to my amazement, the guy on the phone tried to tell me that Dublin and Shannon always had the B757 and had never used the B767-400 for these airports. After giving the man some history lessons, I told him that I would be boycotting Continental until they changed their equipment back to the B767-400 from Dublin. To this day, they are still using the B757. I followed up my phone call with an email to the customer service email address and eventually received a glib response saying that there are complicated algorithms the airlines use when changing equipment for particular airports and schedules based on supply and demand, supplying new routes with a/c, etc. I responded by saying that unlike Continental, I had a very simple algorithm when deciding who to ly with out of Ireland and if they used a B757, I would not fl with them. My Father has two elderly cousins that visit him every year for a month in florida and they fly every year with Continental (they actually buy the ticket for the next year while they are on their holidays). When he asked them if they noticed anthing different about the plane, they said they didn't notice anything so maybe i am being too picky. However, they are definitely still using this aircraft as i have recently checked it.
Posted by jclarke at 12:11 AM
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