A Frontier Airlines agent seemed to take great joy in refusing to check in a man for boarding, managing to display both unprofessionalism and understandable annoyance at a late passenger demanding special accommodation but unwilling to pay for it. Regardless of the merit of any claims of racism, this is a black-and-white issue…concerning airline policy.

Denied and Derided: Passenger Misses Flight, Frontier Agent Loses Cool

A man showed up 30 minutes before his flight and asked to be checked in with the help of an agent. At Frontier Airlines, the check-in cutoff is 60 minutes before the flight, regardless of destination, which seems almost like a punitive way to deny people boarding. But this man was not just a few minutes late…his flight was departing in 30 minutes.

The video starts rolling later than we’d like, but it appears the agents might have been willing to check him in, but he pushed back on paying a $25 agent assist fee, another screwy feature of Frontier’s unbundled fare model that charges you a hefty premium to print out a paper boarding pass.

It appears that the passenger was rude and demanding to the agents, who had no duty to help him out…and met with this entitled behavior, decided not to. When it was too late, the passenger changed his tone, said he would pay the $25, then became indignant when told it was too late.

Unfortunately, the ticketing counter agent then became highly unprofessional, berating and mocking the man and even throwing the F-bomb. Regardless of how much of a jerk he was, a customer-facing airline employee has no business using such foul language.

A Karen named Lauren Witzke, who proudly calls herself a “Christian Nationalist” and is of the anti-Israel, anti-black, anti-immigrant wing of the Trump coalition, alleged on X that a “Black female gate agents at Frontier Airlines go on an unprofessional ghetto power trip. Denying a man the ability to check in, likely because he’s White.”

Sure, Karen. That must be it. There’s no way it could have been that he just checked in late and was a jerk…

But six million people have watched her video, so it is difficult just to ignore mentioning the racial issue.

The division in this country is already bad enough…stoking the racial flames over an issue that may not be racial at all is just absurd (if you watch the whole video above, the passenger was also mocked by a white Frontier employee as well).

CONCLUSION

You get what you pay for when you fly Frontier Airlines. Keep in mind that customer service stinks and that is by design…but with the app you can check in (for free) at least an hour before departure and that if you do not help, it’s better to be nice, or at least laugh, than be demanding (as my wife found out in Denver).

This Frontier employee was an unprofessional jerk. The passenger was probably too. Let’s stop there and save the “racism” charges, please…