Frontier Customer Service Faults Passenger For Not Taking Bags With Her During Emergency Evacuation After Plane Strikes Pedestrian On Runway
If you’ve been told this once, you’ve been told it 100 times: when you’re evacuating a plane in an emergency situation, leave all carry-on items behind. Apparently, a Frontier customer service agent didn’t get that memo following the horrific incident on Friday night when a person was struck and killed by Frontier flight 4345 during takeoff in Denver.
Chloe Kuns, a mother and teacher who was sitting in seat 5C for the flight to Los Angeles, posted on the r/Aviation Subreddit about her experience during the ordeal and what happened in the days following when she reached out to Frontier’s customer service team. Jalopnik reached out to Kuns and was able to verify that her story was legit. She says that because she was one of the only passengers who didn’t reach into the overhead bins for her carry-on luggage (videos online show people evacuating with their luggage), she — and her infant daughter, who was sleeping on her lap at the time of the crash — were among the few people on the ground who didn’t have any of their necessities.
Since she hadn’t heard anything from Frontier about getting personal items left on the plane back, Kuns reached out to the airline in an effort to retrieve things like her keys, wallet, ID, diaper bag, medication and child’s car seat. That won’t happen until May 12, at the earliest, Kuns says, so she decided to buy a new car seat, baby essentials and phone charger in the meantime.
In any case, Kuns and her daughter were automatically rebooked on a 6 a.m. flight from Denver to LA on May 9, she tells Jalopnik. That flight went off without a hitch, but things turned sour before she was due to fly out of LA back to her home in Michigan on May 11. Simply, she couldn’t do it. After all, her ID is still on the plane, and you can’t fly without ID. Because of that, she’s gotta wait in LA until her bags show up.
Kuns needed to speak with a customer service representative about moving her return flight until after she was reunited with her belongings, and that’s when stuff got really nasty. She wrote that she spoke with “9 different customer service agents and supervisors,” looking to get some sort of resolution to her problem, admitting to being a bit of a “pain in the butt,” but the alleged response she got from one of them was pretty damn shocking:
“[A]n agent told me it was my fault I didn’t take my personal items with me off the emergency slide (as I was directed), and had to really fight to not be charged hundreds of dollars for a new flight home once we get our things.
The customer service agent hasn’t been identified, and Jalopnik has reached out to both Frontier and the NTSB for comment on the matter, but so far, we have not heard back.
Kuns knows that it’s not Frontier’s fault she can’t get her things back yet, since the plane is under the NTSB’s care at this point, but a comment like that is just irresponsible.
