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I find myself again perched for a few hours in the KLM Crown Lounge in Amsterdam Airport (non-Schengen gates). In years of passing through I have marveled at how the service line is endlessly overwhelmed, so much so that they have instituted various ticketing systems over time.
Yes, the agents are slow and cannot be rushed. That you pick up in the lounge check-in line that usually stretches outside toward the Mercure transit hotel.
And yes, this lounge is packed at all hours.
Yet I have rarely had any flight delays or cancellations with KLM. They seem to run a good operation at a good airport.
My only issue with them, which is continual, is getting AND keeping seat assignments. I have even had them downgrade me out of confirmed economy comfort seats on Delta-operated flights. My KLM-operation flight overnight last night I was also booted out of a supposedly confirmed seat.
So what gives with KLM? I can’t think of any other lounges in the world that have such a stream of people needing help?
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They did the seat thing to me when I did not checkin until I got to the airport. My wife and I almost had to sit separate for a longhaul flight – really annoying.
I’ve only flown KLM once and, sure enough, they cancelled our confirmed seat assignments. I still remember the dialog. “Sir, you have to check in an hour before an international flight,” the ticket agent said. I had been in line a while; this was some years ago, obviously, before KLM had kiosks at DFW. I looked at my watch. “It’s 63 minutes before departure,” was my answer . . . but that didn’t change anything.
Which seats do you normally try to get? I bet if you confirm a middle seat that you’ll get to keep that one. đ
@Joey – well put. In this case it was a Wideroe ticket that auto-assigned me crap seats, then last month in AMS the lounge agent tried her best, she couldn’t touch 3 of 4 segments directly because they were Delta coded so instead she double booked those segments and hoped the new ones would stick. That meant I couldn’t check in online and guess which one they dropped, but they did auto-assign me another economy comfort seat. Second second was KL-coded, not double-booked, and stuck.
They’re all lining up trying to get your seat? đ