Airlines misplace luggage all the time, but Southwest Airlines is coming under fire for losing a passenger.
After visiting her daughter, Alice Vaticano, 85, was flying home to Denver from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.
A skycap working on behalf of Southwest Airlines promised to take Vaticano in her wheelchair directly to her gate, but actually abandoned her along the way. Vaticano missed her flight and was stuck in Newark for 11 hours.
“She pushed me there and left me,” Vaticano told CBS Denver. “I was just sitting all day in a wheelchair.”
Vaticano, who has diabetes was confined to her wheelchair without food or a chance to use the restrooms, before she was finally noticed by airline employees, according to her daughter, Donna Vaticano.
“Where was she? What happened to her? These are people’s jobs,” Donna Vaticano said, according to the New York Daily News.
Southwest Airlines blamed Vaticano's loopy layover to a processing error in the check-in process.
"It did not alert our employees at the gate to her special need (wheelchair) in boarding the aircraft,” a spokesperson told WCBS.
After Southwest realized the mistake, Vaticano was placed on a connecting flight through Chicago to Denver.
The airline also claimed it gave her a heartfelt apology and $200 worth of airline vouchers.
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