NWA Sucks!

And no, I'm not talking about the gangsta rap group with Easy E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube, cuz dey be ill comin' straight outta Compton, yo (ps - I'm white). I'm talking about NWA Airlines, the "baggage-losing, we-don't-care, pretend-to-make-up-for-it-and-then-screw-you-over" airline. That should be their slogan.

To make a long story short: rewind to January 2007. Eric and I flew on NWA to Calgary to spend a week backcountry skiing in the Monashee mountains from a hut in the middle of nowhere. The only access to the hut is a 45 minute helicopter ride from Revelstoke that leaves once a week. We're talking 200 square miles of mountains with nobody around except the 10 people staying in that hut.

So we get to Calgary and go get our ski bags to get on the road... no ski bags. Neither of ours show up. Our ski bags were literally packed with ALL of our gear. We go to customer service and are told that they will arrive on the next flight in a couple of hours. At this point, getting our bags and making the helicopter ride is going to require driving all night, but what else can we do? The next flight finally makes it in and we start looking for our bags to come out. Nothing. Back to customer service. We are told that our bags didn't make that flight (no kidding!) and that they will be in on the next flight in the morning. At this point, we're going to miss our helicopter and have to stay in Calgary overnight, but NWA wouldn't even put us up in a hotel room. They kept trying to offer to drive our bags out to us when they did arrive; they didn't seem to understand that the only way to get our bags to us if we left the airport would be to fly them over in a helicopter. If they weren't even willing to put us up in a hotel for the night, they certainly weren't going to do that! They did offer us money for toothbrushes though... In the end, we ended up sleeping in the airport for the night, getting our bags the next morning, and paying extra for a helicopter ride to the hut the next day.

The point of retelling this story is that part of the resolution from NWA was giving Eric and I each $300 in vouchers for another flight any time in the next calendar year. The lady at customer service gave us each three $100 vouchers instead of just giving us a free ticket because, as she put it, "If I give you a free ticket, you will be subject to limited seats and blackout dates. If you use these vouchers you can buy a flight at any time. They're like cash".

OK, awesome. Sure, NWA really messed up with our bags, but now we're on our way and we have a free flight to use within the next year. Maybe NWA isn't so bad after all, right?

Well, now fast-forward back to yesterday. Our vouchers are about to expire, so Eric calls me up to plan a trip to somewhere, anywhere really, where it costs less than $300 to get to. Eric calls up the number on the vouchers to redeem them and is promply told that since we got three $100 vouchers instead of one $300 voucher, only one voucher can be used per flight! So since these things are about to expire and I can't really buy 3 separate flights at a $100 discount for each right now, NWA has successfully screwed us over AGAIN!