BANGOR, Maine — UPDATE: Rober Glover, a professor at the University of Maine, posted on Twitter at about 11 p.m. Wednesday that he has arrived home.
Sometimes frustrations can boil over into social media after a flight delay or cancellation, but a University of Maine professor is hoping his social media post can spark some change—or at least get him home after being stranded for four days in an airport hotel.
Robert Glover said he and his partner were flying back from the Caribbean and had to make a connecting flight in Miami. They went through customs but then had to wait for their bags to be unloaded, a process that was delayed by an hour by the airline.
Because of that delay, the two had to rush to the gate to make their next connecting flight to D.C. The couple thought they had made it with 14 minutes to spare, however, the American Airlines employee at the gate said they had to be there 15 minutes before departure, or else their seats would be given to standby passengers—which is exactly what happened.
The two missed their window by one minute, Glover said. That was Saturday.
Glover said they were given a voucher for one night at a nearby airport hotel in Miami, but after being booked and canceled four other times, they remained in Miami on Wednesday waiting for flights back to Bangor.
Meanwhile, their baggage made that connecting flight on Saturday and is sitting in D.C., so the two have had to buy clothing and food and have been paying for each extra night in the hotel.
"This is incredibly inconvenient, but this isn't going to financially destroy us," Glover said. "There's a lot of people for whom a disruption like this is going to mess up their life. They're going to be maxing out credit cards, clearing out savings accounts. So I understand there are national issues with workforce shortages, and everybody is kind of struggling. But this, to me it seems, it's kind of unbelievable."
Glover tweeted his story Tuesday night, tagging Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, and American Airlines. He said the only response he got from the airline was a reiteration of its policy, that passengers arrive 15 minutes before departure.