Chaos erupted at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina when two Frontier Airlines representatives screamed at a paying customer and barred him from checking in for his flight.
The interaction between the unnamed customer, a 45-year-old married father of three, and the Frontier representatives began shortly before he started filming last Friday, according to the New York Post, which obtained the video that millions have viewed on social media.
He reportedly showed up at the airport 50 minutes before his flight but had not checked in online. He missed the electronic kiosk’s 60-minute check-in deadline, and when he approached the agents, they told him he needed to pay a $25 late check-in fee.
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“They all kind of started chiming in, ‘Well, you should have checked the website,’ like, not in a professional or polite way,” the man told the outlet. “They were like, ‘It was your fault for not checking the website. Sorry, it’s on you,'”
A back-and-forth with the agents ensued over the fee and lasted for about 20 minutes before he decided to pay it, the customer said.
“I’m never flying this sh—y airline again,” he admitted to saying before he began filming, setting the agents off.
“Oh, you’re going to check me in,” the agent said, apparently quoting the customer’s words back to him. “I bet you was wrong.”
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“I paid for a ticket,” the man said in the video.
“And you didn’t pay $25 for an agent assist fee,” the agent says. “And you thought you was going to check in three hours later, hello?”
“And you thought you was going to get on your flight?” the agent repeatedly asks while filming the customer and snapping her fingers.
Meanwhile, another agent can be heard laughing.
“Because it’s a policy, we don’t control that,” the other agent said.
The customer was reportedly traveling from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Boston.
“Make me check you in,” the first agent says several times.
“You literally work for an airline that I bought a ticket for,” the customer says.
The man vented his frustration to the New York Post.
“What was remarkable to me also is that not one person on their side took the professional route or the high road,” he told the outlet.
“Listen, it’s my money at the end of the day, and when somebody is caught off guard with a charge that they feel is in some ways unfair or unreasonable, of course they have a right to express themselves,” he said.
The New York Post reported that he ended up paying $500 for a JetBlue ticket to get home.
“It’s not OK to be disrespectful of somebody for no reason, but I was not being disrespectful to them personally, in my opinion,” he said. “I thought that they were being disrespectful to me out of the gate because I was complaining about a fee that I was completely caught off guard by.”
Frontier said it has cut ties with the representatives, who were not directly employed by the company.
“We are aware of what occurred and have been directly in touch with the customer,” a spokesperson for the airline confirmed. “The individuals in question, who work for a third-party contractor, are no longer associated with the Frontier account.”
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