USA Today has a good article today about very unhappy United Airlines passengers. United’s customer satisfaction rating dropped more than any other big US carrier this year. Check out the horror stories here. We think it is depressing it takes USA Today investigating to get United to do right by these people…
In a positive move, United recruited a new vice president for customer experience from Walt Disney, a company with a good public reputation, and is making changes. However, during bankruptcy, United cut 21,000 jobs, including hundreds of U.S. reservations and customer service jobs, going to call centers in Poland, the Phillipines, and of course, India. As one United executive commented…””Bankruptcy is a cataclysmic event…it forces you to think about sacred cows.”
However, United is hardly alone…US Airways, as the Consumerist reports, has promised to fix its awful website…Note the statement that “[US Airways] CIO, Joe Beery says he’d like to be buried in a kiosk.” They think they are being funny. We’re not sure we want our airline to be funny when it is telling us how it plans to fix its mistakes. Their website is not even Mac and Mozilla Firefox compatible…It doesn’t encourage our business…
The Coalition for a Passenger Bill of Rights…the organization started by stranded passenger Kate Hanni is gaining momentum and has issued an Airline Stranding Report Card. Essentially, most of the major carriers failed.
Of course, people seem to want to blame the airline staff, instead of the airline management…USA Today reported on the increase of fliers taking action against their anger out on flight attendants…One flight attendant was shocked when a passenger spit on her shoe when deplaning…Being that interfering with flight crew is a federal crime, the Courts are seeing more of these cases, as we have reported, of planes being diverted and unruly passengers being removed…
Airlines are taking action now that the industry is not in as dire straits as it was after 9/11, including customer service initiatives, such as the ‘new’ Delta. However, with stress levels while traveling at a high…and air travel becoming more and more no-frills…it may not be possible to easily rectify the problem…