Between June 30 and September 7, Delta is offering 1,000 SkyMiles for using their mobile app to check-in for your flight. Registration is required.

I spend a lot more time on the phone with airlines than I’d care to think about (or admit). Probably somewhere around 2-3 hours per day when all is said and done. There are some airlines that are totally predictable, be it in a good way or a bad way. Sometimes I’ll pick up the phone and know for sure I won’t have an issue because agents are consistently well trained. With other airlines I can’t help but wonder what new rule they’ll come up with when I call them.

With that in mind, I’ll share some general observations of mine, ranking call centers from best to worst:

Aeroplan

Aeroplan is Air Canada’s spun off frequent flyer program. In theory you’d think that means they have “lower” standards, though that’s not the case. In my experience they have the most consistently well trained agents. I don’t dread calling them since I know I can tell them exactly what I want, and I won’t have any issues. While the general “golden rule” of call centers is to “hang up and call again” if you don’t get the answer you like, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had to do that with Aeroplan. So kudos to them.

American

I rarely have issues with American, simply because their award system is “simple.” By that I mean that everything prices as one-ways, stopovers aren’t allowed except at North American gateways, and they operate based on routing rules. All that translates to very little that agents can be confused about.

The one item of confusion is often getting them to request the right fare buckets when booking awards. While Star Alliance has very consistent “codes” for first and business class awards (“O” and “I” respectively), OneWorld has a few different ones. For example, the “normal” first class award code for OneWorld is “Z,” while Qantas uses “P.” So nine out of ten times if you call American after finding Qantas award space online you’ll be told it’s not there, unless you prompt the agent to request “P” space. At that point the agent will either apologize for not knowing that to begin with, or belittle you for trying to tell them how to do their job.

Continental

Oh my gosh, these people are chatty. So chatty. You know that neighbor you have that, whenever you pull into the driveway, will corner you and start an hour-long conversation about something entirely irrelevant? I once had an agent tell me a 30 minute long story about the former call center contract that Continental used to have with Disney, that ended with the merger. Want to make a new friend? Call up Continental and say “hey, can you tell me about the Disney call center contract you guys used to have?” You’ll be on the phone all day.

With that out of the way, I find Continental very easy to deal with, simply because their computer auto-prices awards. When you call other airlines with crazy routings, like San Francisco to Munich to Zurich to Bangkok to Tokyo, they’ll usually immediately tell you “gee, I don’t think that’s going to be legal.” Continental, on the other hand, will usually be happy to enter just about anything, since the computer will tell them how much it should cost.

On one hand that means there are fewer opportunities to “take advantage” of an airline when it comes to award routings (see US Airways below), but on the other hand it makes things very simple.

And of course as they’re waiting for your award to price, ask the agent to sing your toddler a lullaby. They’ll be more than happy to, I’m sure.

United

United’s call center experience is incredibly inconsistent. For one, you have everything from highly trained agents in Chicago to agents based in Pune that often aren’t trained so well. I will say as a general rule, as far as outsourced airline call centers go, United’s are among the best.

Everything has to be done manually at United, meaning you give them the routing and then they have to manually verify that it’s “legal.” That can be a positive or a negative. As an example, I’ll often read the agent an award routing, and they’ll immediately tell me “I don’t think that’s going to be legal,” and refuse to even try. Some will tell me “it has to come up automatically between the origin and destination for me to book this.” On the other end of the spectrum, you have other agents that are willing to book just about anything without verifying the legality of the routing. I know plenty of cases of people getting more than one stopover, exceeding the MPM, etc., simply because there aren’t any automatic checks in place.

US Airways

US Airways’ call center is so bad that it’s good. Literally. US Airways’ award system doesn’t auto-price anything, which can really work in your advantage, since geography isn’t a strong point for most US Airways agents. For example, most US Airways agents believe Madrid is in South America and Amman is in Vietnam. They also believe Europe is a country. Use that to your advantage accordingly. Along the same lines, US Airways agents are very religious, so if you have the same first name as a book in the Bible, be prepared for the agent to belch out a quick “hallelujah” (I’m actually not saying that to be funny, it has happened on more than one occasion).

Delta

When I’m having a bad day I just remind myself how fortunate I am not to be an agent at Delta SkyMiles. Can you imagine what it would be like to have someone call in and ask for award space, only to have to tell them that a one way coach award from Malaga to New York will run them 125,000 miles… plus fuel surcharges? Or how about a business class award to Europe… for 325,000 miles?

There are so many issues with SkyMiles that I don’t even know where to start. From my perspective, the first issue is that award space for so many of Delta’s partners can’t be searched online, so I often have to rely on SkyMiles agents to tell me the correct information. Second, SkyTeam uses so many different fare “codes” for award tickets, that agents can’t even keep track of them. Third, so many SkyTeam airlines have blackout dates. That means that the partner airline could very well have award availability, though you can’t book it through Delta due to “blackout dates.” That’s not the case with Star Alliance or OneWorld, as far as I know (some airlines do have blackout dates, but then the availability doesn’t show up — as opposed to SkyTeam where the agent sees it but it’s blacked out).

My theory is that the reason Delta SkyMiles agents are so poorly trained is because they never actually book awards. People call in to ask about how much an award would cost, only to be told 500,000 miles, hang up, and call it a day.

As far as most SkyMiles agents are concerned, the only airlines in SkyTeam are Delta and Air France. Vietnam Airlines? Huh? What’s that?

So it’s not that the agents themselves are that bad. It’s a combination of poorly trained agents and very little to work with.

…Ryanair!

Straight from Ryanair’s website:

Ryanair today (29^th June) celebrated IATA confirmation that it is the world’s favourite airline after IATA stats for 2010 showed Ryanair carried more international passengers than any other airline.

My condolences to all 71.2 million of you.

It’s not often I’ll just point to a thread and say “read this,” but this is quite possibly the most interesting thread I’ve ever read on the internet. FlyerTalk member LaLaland started a thread innocently enough with this post:

So… I have been saving miles for two years now… was planning to take the wife anywhere she wanted to go this Summer. The greedy, ungrateful, unfaithful, (expletive) just tee’d me off in the most unforgiving way… so I’m taking 3 of my 20 or so weeks of vacation and getting as far away from her as possible — ALONE.

What makes this thread more interesting than just about anything else on the internet is that the thread isn’t just a teaser. Over the next 20 or so pages and five weeks, he shares just about all the details of what happened, his life, the divorce he’s filing for, etc. The story is straight out of a movie.

LaLaland works in the movie industry and managed to standby for an earlier flight after coming back from a meeting so he could get home to his family earlier, only to find his wife cheating on him… with a 19 year old.  Apparently it wasn’t just a one off, and they were actually doing drugs together at their house as well (possibly in the presence of their kids).

Hell, he even shares the amount of money he’s having to pay his wife, the story about his wife moving out, and what’s going on in court. Then there’s this most recent post:

Thats not all we’ll have to blur … this kid is 19yo but looks 10yo (down there) on the video… what is up with with these teenage ‘boys’ shaving themselves to nothing down there? A little manscaping is one thing, but I don’t get the whole ‘I want to look like I haven’t gone through puberty yet look’… I guess they are trying to make themselves ‘look’ bigger or like porn ‘stars’ LOL… My atty and I had a big belly laugh when we were previewing the footage. He said this only magnifies the sheer contrast of their age difference. You should have seen the Judge’s face when we put that video up (dropped jaw, eyebrows raised, glasses pushed up from the end of his nose and leaning forward to get a better look see)… he even asked her attorney afterwards… “are you sure this kid is 19″?

Grab an ice cold beer (or ice cold Diet Coke with lime), clear an hour or two of your time, and read the whole thread. You won’t regret it.

Check out my weekly column over at TravelSort.com. This week I share some tips for securing award seats for travel to Hawaii.

And in case you missed my column from last week, you can find it here. It’s about how to password protect your reservations and itineraries, after my incident earlier in the month where someone maliciously canceled my ticket.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Daily Steals’ offer for a “free” world power adapter, though shipping was $4.99. I figured $10 for two world power adapters sounded like a great deal, so I placed my order without hesitation.

I was excited to see them arrive in the mail today, so I opened the package only to find that the adapter had more parts than an Airbus 380. I figured it was just a defect and the other one would be better, but nope, it was the same.

The adapter was supposed to look like this, but instead it looked like this:

Well, I guess at least now I know why the website is called “Daily Steals“…

Anyone else have the same experience?