does ops ever call the hotel?

[atldc9]

I used to have this problem. Settled it pretty quickly. When you ask op's to call the hotel, tell them to get the name of the person with whom they spoke. When you call in your times, get op's to give you the name. Pretty easy to tell who is lying when they have to answer the question, either at the hotel or airport- 'who'd you talk too?'

Trust but verify.

 

[GateGirl]

I used to have this problem. Settled it pretty quickly. When you ask op's to call the hotel, tell them to get the name of the person with whom they spoke. When you call in your times, get op's to give you the name. Pretty easy to tell who is lying when they have to answer the question, either at the hotel or airport- 'who'd you talk too?'

Yup and thats what ops says to you "sorry XXXX, there must be something wrong with one of our radios I didnt quite get the end of that last transmission..."

 

[crashpad]

The oriental proverb says;'Why do something yourself when you can get others to do it for you'. I like; 'If you want something done right, do it yourself' Hint: cellphone as you're leaving the aeroplane.
Of course, if you're the captain you can ask a fellow crewmember to do it and kill two birds.....it works fine, either way.

 

[91100 100 set]

Dash8, it happens everywhere dude. But mostly at those super-senior US stations all across the NYS thruway. I was home last Sat, and was planning on going to the party, LG called me to see if I was going, but I was out running errands all afternoon and got home completely exhausted at like 9 pm, so I figured I'd work on the dent in my couch and watch taped episodes of Aqua Teen (loser, I know). I shoulda come out for it. I've never been to a MR party, and lately my attitude seems to be right in line with his, so we'd have lots to talk about (and drink lots of Mr. Seigal's mini's)

GateGirl, I know there are alot of ramp, gate, and ops folks that work pretty darn hard all over and for lots of different companies with and without the express tag on it, and I give them credit where credit is due. But it burns me to see 10 rampers sitting in a break room watching CABLE TV (my own domicile has 50+ channels on the TV), on the clock mind you. Or the ones that have the nerve to yell at you when you come into the breakroom and turn the lights on to read something and you wake them up. Still on the clock. Dateline runs episodes about when I fall asleep on the clock...

 

[FlyChicaga]

Usually our Ops is very good about it. Sometimes it's the hotel that's making the excuses though. "Nope, they never called, first we heard of it." Right.

The worst I've ever experienced is when we completed a rough day with an approach in a snowstorm up in Michigan, right down to minimums. Get inside, exhausted, ready to get the heck to the hotel, and find no van. Go get ops? Nope, they are out working the outbound flight for the next 15 minutes. So we try to call using the number off our pairings via cell phone. None of us can reach the hotel. So we head to the hotel phone board. Not going through. By this time ops is out at the counter again. They try, no luck. What is going on?? We call dispatch, see if they can try. No luck there either. Finally, after 30 minutes, we go in search of a taxi. But alas, no taxis are available. Won't be available for a while due to the snowstorm. So we keep trying the hotel. Nothing. Finally, over an hour and a half later, we just call another hotel and see if they can bill the company. Luckily we find a real nice hotel up the road (actually better than ours), and 2 hours after we blocked in are finally in bed. Only bad news is that we need a 4:30 am van, but they don't start van service until 5:30 am. WTF??? So we manage to negotiate that one of the building maintenance personnel will drive us to the airport at 4:30 am.

Turns out the power went out in the whole area our hotel was located, which was about 2 miles up the road from the hotel we ended up at that night. I'm thinking we need to permanently change, since it's a more "electrically sound" area.

 

[gordon24]

Another good hotel story along the same line as above. We landed in LEX in the middle of a snow-storm about 0045 (about an 30 mins late) for the CD (stand-up, nap, high-speed, whatever you call it). To no one's surprise, the van wasn't there. I called the front desk and was told to get a cab as the driving conditions are unsafe and they won't be sending the van. Well, after about midnight, LEX is a ghost town. I couldn't even find a cab, much less a phone number for one. So, I called back to the hotel and asked them to call us a cab, wondering why this hadn't been arranged already.

After about waiting for 40 mins, I did some searching around and found a list of cab phone numbers behind a customer service desk. I called one and got a cab on the way. After another 40 mins, we are finally at the hotel. The Capt. asks me to sign us all in while he speaks to the manager. The "on-duty" manager happens to be the same little sh%t that is checking us in. The Capt. asks, if they knew they weren't going to run the van, why didn't they set up a cab for us since we do the same flight every night? His response was, "well, I've been inconvenienced by Delta before, so there you go!" I thought the Capt was going to come un-glued. I wanted to reach across the desk and strangle that little toad. To make a long story short, we went to bed and got about an hour of sleep. How we got back to the airport is another story....