The drumbeat of complaints regarding United Airline’s deteriorating customer service continues. In the Trade Your Bags For Another $1/Hr post, I mentioned the results of the recent University of Michigan customer satisfaction survey. If the satisfaction index for the airline industry in general plummeted — they’re now just barely ahead of the IRS — then the score for United Airlines did a free-fall, landing at the bottom of the list. TravelCommons got looped into an edge of this growing blogstorm. Our last post, commenting on the Chicago Tribune story about the weekend-long ordeal of United passengers trying to get home from Jamaica, was picked up by a UCLA law professor who then linked over to last week’s USAToday article titled “United passengers air their bitter grievances”. The article lists an incredible litany of complaints.

Things only got worse last week when an IT tester took down United’s entire operations system, stranding most of their fleet Wednesday morning. I was flying from San Francisco (SFO) to Chicago (ORD) that evening and felt lucky that my flight arrived only 50 minutes late. Two days later, I received a fairly bland e-mail apology from United’s Vice-President of Customer Experience Barbara Higgins:

Dear Mark A Peacock,

On behalf of United, I want to express our sincere regrets for any disruption to service you may have experienced when flying with us on Wednesday and Thursday this week. We know you expect us to take you where you want to go with on-time departures and arrivals. We failed to meet your expectations on those days.

As you may be aware, a computer outage, due to human error during routine system testing, significantly impacted our operations systemwide. Working as a team, we were able to get our airplanes and crews back on schedule … and our passengers on their way.

We greatly appreciated your patience and know that we will make every effort to keep this type of situation from occurring in the future.

Your satisfaction and business mean a great deal to United, and we look forward to our next opportunity to serve you.

Sincerely,

Barbara Higgins
Vice-President
Customer Experience
United Airlines

I compare this to the impassioned, heartfelt apology over the PA from the lead flight attendant on my SFO-ORD flight. Obviously exhausted by a long day, his voice cracked as he thanked us for “hanging in there” on what was a “helluva” day. The whole crew lined up and thanked each passenger as we left the plane.

Though I’ve had more than my share of rude gate agents and flight attendants, this episode reinforced my sense that the cause of United’s (and American’s and Northwest’s) customer service woes lies with those employees and managers who never see a passenger — the ones who can hide by ignoring ringing phones and full e-mail boxes. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal talks about the impact of training programs that require executives to perform front-line jobs. I’d like to see Ms Higgins roll up her sleeves and clean up the backlog of ticket refunds mentioned by so many passengers interviewed in the USAToday article, or help find some lost luggage, or help work some of those concourse-long lines that appear when United’s delays and cancellations force people to miss their flights. Perhaps some front-line experience would incent her and her colleagues to fix United’s mess rather than send me their generic apologies.

Tags: travel, travel delays, customer service, passenger complaints, United Airlines

The Chicago Tribune’s Sunday Business section featured a 3,600-word in-depth analysis of a United Airlines flight that went terribly wrong. United Flight 1073 was supposed to leave Montego Bay, Jamaica at 1:55pm on Saturday, March 31, 2007. It didn’t leave the ground until the following Monday, April 2. The article is a very good read, and identifies two cost-cutting tactics as the main culprits for the weekend from hell endured by the passengers:

• United’s employee count has been cut to a level that has no slack to handle extraordinary events. Flight 1073 is just the most recent example. The December 2006 blizzards that closed United’s Chicago and Denver hubs clearly illustrated the company’s lack of “surge” capacity
• United’s bankruptcy restructuring included aggressively replacing United employees with contract workers. However, they didn’t replace the informal communication channels that company employees typically provide. It seems that no United executive was aware of the situation in Jamaica until Saturday night when one passenger, according to the article, “sat in the bathroom and sent e-mails to everyone he could think of: newspaper reporters, friends who work at United, even the airline’s CEO, Glenn Tilton. ‘Please, help us!’ the messages said. One of his missives was forwarded to (Barbara) Higgins (the new vice-president of customer experience), who eventually responded.”

You have to feel a little bad for Barbara Higgins, who just the day before took the job as vice-president of customer experience. She does stand-up and take responsibility for the problem — “What we tried to do was acknowledge the utter failure of our service on that flight.” However, United doesn’t appear to be doing anything new. According to the article, “Higgins and her team prepared to greet every person returning from Jamaica with apologies, $300 travel vouchers and a special lane to speed them through immigration in Chicago. The airline would later agree to reimburse passengers for all out-of-pocket costs.” “We want to proactively acknowledge that this is not the service we want to provide,” Higgins said.

How about saving a few of those travel voucher and hiring a few more gate agents, baggage handlers and call center agents? How about being “proactive” about avoiding delays instead of flying a team around with make-nice coupons that, given the current seat occupancy rates, are nearly impossible to use anyways? Higgins’ challenge is to improve the customer experience for everyone, not just paper it over for the few who endured a weekend in hell courtesy of United Airlines.

Tags: travel, travel delays, Chicago Tribune, Jamaica, outsourcing, United Airlines

Recorded in the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, the former Playboy Club, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I talk about the travails of “playing injured” — traveling while sick. A listener comment makes me wonder if I’m exaggerating the state of the US travel experience. We get a good suggestion on how to wrestle with charging all those electronic devices we carry, and some detailed “behind-the-scenes” explanations of how air crews are treated by the TSA. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.

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The front page of today’s USAToday — the unofficial newspaper of record for the frequent traveler — greeted its readers with an article stating “Flights on U.S. airlines arrived late more often in the first four months of this year than in any other year since the government began tracking the numbers 13 years ago.” Not exactly dawn breaking over Marblehead for those of us who fly every week. The top 4 airports on the delay hit parade were no surprise — Newark, LaGuardia, JFK, and O’Hare.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is 0-for-3 — the airports they run own the top of the list. I can’t say that the Newark statistic surprises me. The tight runways and the approach over the Jersey Turnpike has always meant that somebody just spitting on a runway can cause a 45-minute delay. You gotta be impressed by the Port Authority’s response, though. According to the article, they said last week that they’d “set up a task force to study ways to reduce delays”. There’s proactive ownership for you. If these flight delay findings were a surprise to the Port Authority, if they didn’t know they had a delay problem months ago, then they have a whole other set of problems.

The number 4 and 5 positions on the list were a bit of a surprise to me — Philadelphia and Charlotte. What do these airports have in common? They’re both US Airways hubs. Guess that old “US Scare” moniker still holds true.

Tags: travel, travel delays, USAToday, Newark, Port Authority, US Airways