Northwest Airlines

[vacanut]

Has anyone flown NWA, any feedback would be appreciated. I'm looking to book airfare for November but have only flown Continental and Delta. NWA has the best rates/schedules. Are we able to assign seats?

 

[Kimberle]

I've flown NW tons, for a good 30 years. Years ago, almost every flight had a delay. Currently, I have only experienced minimum delays. They've also never lost my luggage. My parents fly NW alot, too. We've always been very happy with their service.

 

[CarolA]

THere is no significant difference between NW and the others you mention.

 

[CarolMN]

And yes, you can select your seats - within certain restrictions (NW reserves certain seats for its FF, for example). Also NW doesn't generally assign seats until 90 days or so prior to departure. If you book farther ahead than that, you don't get to select seats. You can check in 24 hours ahead of time though, and change to another seat then (assuming there are still empty seats that you qualify for).

Best wishes -

 

[vossjemi]

I just took my first NWA flight. I booked online and could access my ressie online. I signed up for notifications of flight change times/seat info/etc....I also calendared for myself to remember to check 90 days out. Sure enough, 90 days out, they had assigned my seats. By accessing my ressie online, I was able to change those seats to ones I wanted, no problems.

As far as the flight itself.....well, big problems. We had ice/rain the night before. They got us all on the plane, and 20 minutes later proceeded to tell us they were waiting to be de-iced. Then, 20 minutes after that told us their 1 and only de-icing truck was broken and we had to wait for an AA de-icer to come. After an hour and a half of waiting, we finally took off. This caused us to miss our connection in Memphis. It was the only straight connection to Miami that day. So, they gave us a new route to New Orleans and then to Miami, but we had to wait 4 1/2 hours for that flight. When the flight time arrived, they announced flight would be delayed at least an hour to fix a PA system problem. We immediately went to the counter as we knew we'd miss our NO connection if this flight too was delayed. They changed us to a St. Louis flight that was leaving immediately...so we ran to that gate. Got to St. Louis in plenty of time, but gate agent neglected to tell us St. Louis Airport had been closed for 2 hours that day, which caused big problems at the airport. We waited an hour to disembark the plan due to clearing of snow and no gate with which to connect. We were sure we'd miss our connection to MIA.

We literally ran to our gate (mobs of people, let me tell you) and there were at least 200 waiting to go through security. NW had changed the last leg to AA as NW couldn't get us there that day due to all the missed connections. Security was nice enough to route me to another security entrance to bypass the crowds and we got to our gate 15 minutes late. Luckily, the plane had been delayed too, so we were finally off to MIA.

We arrived at MIA around 9:30pm (supposed to be there at noon). Of course, our luggage didn't make it. It went to New Orleans. I guess they couldn't get it off in Memphis even though they had an hour delay due to the PA problem. And, it didn't make it from NO to MIA because that Memphis flight did indeed miss the connection. Met up with some people on our return flight who stayed with the NO trip and they didn't end up getting to MIA until 2 am. By the time we got luggage claim stuff filled out, we finally got to our hotel around midnight. Starving.

Not my idea of a good flight. I'm planning on writing NW a ltr, but I'm not sure it will do any good. Not sure if I'll ever fly with them again or not.

edited to add: Since AA was the last leg, apparently AA was responsible for getting us our luggage. AA was great. The luggage arrived at 8:30am the next morning.