My customer service experience with Go Airlines yesterday was terrible. They were providing our flight from Honolulu to Lihue last night, and our flight was supposed to take off from HNL at 5:45 p.m. When we first checked in with the front desk at about 5:00, they said the flight was delayed until about 6:00. We were okay with that, since we’d been rushing to make it there from our Denver-to-Honolulu flight.

We got into the terminal and waited and waited and waited. The computer screen was never updated to tell us anything except that the flight was delayed. When I asked the customer-service person in the terminal what the reason for the delay was, she got really snotty with me and said she was busy with something else (which she wasn’t), but that there was a maintenance problem. She didn’t have any information about when we’d leave. Other flights on the same airline were going in and out from the same terminal, but there was nothing on the Lihue flight.

At about 7:30, the inept customer-service worker announced over the PA that they were happy to announce boarding for flight 1006 to Lihue. We looked out the windows and didn’t see any airplane, unlike the other flights that had come and gone in the last two hours. Regardless, we picked up our stuff and started congregating around the door that she’d announced. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes, we were among the first people to sit back down and wait. Psych! She got us good!

Eventually, they announced another flight that did take us to Kauai. It lifted off at 8:45 p.m. — a full three hours later than it was supposed to, for a 25-minute flight. The flight crew told us there had been a maintenance problem, then one of their crew members had gotten off and they had to call someone else in on their day off to cover for him. These people were apologetic, better than the ground crew girls, but they didn’t offer us anything to make things right.

I’m going to call the airline to complain tomorrow, but given the fact that we only paid $50 per seat, I don’t see that they’ll be able to do much. (Maybe they’ll refund the $10.00 per suitcase that we paid for our checked luggage — what a ripoff!) My problem wasn’t just that something was wrong with the plane, which could happen to any airline, but the failure of the people on the front lines. They were uncommunicative unless someone specifically asked them what was happening, and they gave bad information more often than not when someone did ask them.