Watching United Airlines cancel more than 600 flights at the beginning of Christmas week, I was glad that I was flying Frontier Airlines to Denver later in the week for a holiday ski vacation. The US Dept of Transportation’s latest Air Travel Consumer Report supported this feeling, showing Frontier with the lowest rate of canceled flights in November 2007. However, I was less thrilled when I found myself waiting almost an hour in Denver and O’Hare for Frontier’s luggage carousels to disgorge my family’s checked luggage.

As airlines grasp at profitability in the face of $100/barrel oil, they are tightly optimizing their cost structures. Their operations don’t have what project managers call “slack”. In this case, the spare capacity or resources to handle less-than-ideal circumstances.

United blames what they said was the worst December weather in company’s history for the incredible number of flight cancellations and delays during Christmas week. However, American and Southwest Airlines both managed to face the same weather issues at their Chicago hubs with only a handful of cancellations — United needed to cancel over 140 Chicago flights by Christmas Eve, while American dropped 11 flights and Southwest lost only 4. United’s airline pilots union says the problem wasn’t weather, it was lack of pilots. A union spokesman said, “They don’t have enough people. A little bit of a burp, and boom, they’re hammered.” United could have built in buffers — some slack — into their December crew schedules, but then would’ve lost money if the buffers weren’t needed. United gambled and it lost.
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Northwestern University Library just launched web access to their Transportation Library Menu Collection, which includes “more than 400 menus from 54 national and international airline carriers, cruise ships, and railroad companies, with coverage from 1929 to the present.” Most of the menus are from George Foster, a Northwestern alum, who appears to have mostly flown first class on his travels around the world for UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Each page of each menu has been scanned. The lunch menu for a March 1969 United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Detroit supports United’s “Red Carpet” theme with a bright red accent on each page. The beverage list asks passengers to “Please be our guest” and order the “United Airlines Special Very Dry Martini (Gin or Vodka)”. On the facing page, we can see Foster commenting that the “Poached Quenelle of Scallops, Nantua Sauce” were “Excellent”. He didn’t note whether he chose the “Broiled Filet Mignon, Bercy Sauce” or the “Baked Langostinos Thermador” for his entreé. A bit different from the turkey wrap and the cold chicken salad I was offered when upgraded United’s First Class a couple of weeks ago.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been wondering if it has been my bad luck with Hertz or the rental car industry trying to stretch their cars a bit farther. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal assuaged my paranoia. Though Hertz claims their fleet age hasn’t changed, the owners of National, Alamo, and Enterprise Rent A Car admit that they’re letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles. My personal experience — I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.

I don’t care as much about the mileage as I do the state of the car when I receive it. The last couple of cars I received from Hertz at San Francisco Airport made me pull a T-shirt out of my bag so I could sit on something clean. Stained seats, soda residue on the center console, ashes in a supposed non-smoking car — I could take an extra 2,000 miles if Hertz would just clean the insides of the car once in a while.
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Sitting in Philadelphia Airport drinking a pint of Hop Hog IPA beer from the Lancaster Brewing Company in nearby Lancaster, PA reminded me of a recent USA Today article about the growth of local food fare in airports. According to the article:

“There was a trend toward national brands in the 1990s, but now there’s a desire for more balance with local brands,” says Pat Banducci, senior vice president of HMS Host, a concessionaire at 102 airports worldwide, including 73 in North America. Local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports, Banducci says. He expects that to grow to 50% within five years.

We’ve talked about this trend in earlier TravelCommons podcasts. My travels through Memphis last year were each punctuated with meals at either the Corky’s or Interstate BBQ stands in the airport, and my single memory of Austin airport was lunch at Salt Lick BBQ. However, beer seems to be the most popular local fare. The Independence Brew Pub here in Philadelphia Airport, the Anchor Steam bar in San Francisco Airport, the Gordon Biersch Brew Pub in San Jose Airport… Though my own personal sampling could be biased.

The USA Today article suggests that “the shift to local restaurants began largely after 9/11. People are spending more time in airports, checking in hours before flights to meet security requirements.” It’s not just additional security requirements, though, that are giving people additional “dwell” time in airports. Through June, 27.1% of flights were at least 15 minutes late or canceled, a record for the period, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. With 2-3 extra hours to kill in airports, getting a taste of local fare helps people get a little something out of a bad situation.

As good as this trend is, though, it’s just not the same as getting out and about in the city you’re visiting. Somehow I don’t think I’d find the egg, cheese, and scrapple sandwich I bought from a streetcart this morning on 18th Street anywhere in this airport.

Tags: travel, food, beer, airport restaurants,travel delays, scrapple

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

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

A New York Times article provides an interesting behind-the-scenes view of the balance airlines are trying to strike between maximizing revenue through overbooking, and raising the ire of customers and their front-line employees when passengers get bumped from oversold flights. Interviewing a number of people at US Airways, the article reveals the tensions between the back-office analysts trying to wring the last penny out of every flight and the gate agents who bear the brunt of passenger fury when the desk jockeys get the math wrong. One of the more revealing insights was the lack of repercussions (other than hosting a toy crow for a week) the analysts faced when they caused significant numbers of passengers to be bumped.

This is a timely article because, as much as I hate the “perfect storm” metaphor, I think this summer could be an ugly one for US air travelers.

• Airline seat occupancy is forecasted to be 85% this summer
• Airport delays are already high and are growing as air traffic exceeds pre-9/11 levels
• Airline profits are under pressure from high fuel costs
• Airlines are having difficulty hiring the ground and support staff (ramp workers, gate agents, customer service reps) needed to handle disruptions caused by weather or plane break-downs (see this TravelCommons posting for a further discussion)

All this portends more passengers being involuntarily bumped in the coming months. Knowing your rights when overbooked and setting your expectations before you travel is probably one of the best strategies for limiting inconvenience and high blood pressure. The ASTA - the American Society of Travel Agents - has a good primer on their web site. The write-up on the US Department of Transportation’s site isn’t bad either. The best single piece of advice — if they can’t give you a seat assignment when you book the flight, look for another flight.

Tags: travel, travel delays, overbooking, bumping, US Airways

We’ve talked many times here about how the act of travel has lost its glamor, is no longer fun for the frequent traveler. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, life isn’t so glamorous on the other side of the travel counter.

Airlines used to offer prestigious jobs with good wages and coveted flight benefits. Now, in the aftermath of aggressive cutbacks, a growing number of airline jobs are more akin to those at a fast-food restaurant. The pay is low, the work is tough and, in a new twist, airlines are having trouble hanging onto workers and finding new ones. “What once was a glamorous job…doesn’t look so good any more,” says Andy Roberts, executive vice president of operations for Northwest Airlines Corp. Mr. Roberts says Northwest and its peers used to have a list of applicants “as long as your arm.” Now, “we have to go seek them out, even pilots.”

Southwest Airlines’ ramp workers start at $8.75/hr. Northwest Airlines ramp workers start at $9/hr. Wal-Mart sales associates average, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers (who are trying to organize them) $8.23/hr. Some may say that working in a Wal-Mart is a soul-numbing job. However, working outside on the ramp in Chicago or Minneapolis in January is a body-numbing job, and not for a whole lot more money. The resulting short staffing, absenteeism, and high turnover just give us three more reasons not to check luggage.

But even positions where there seem to be enough job applicants — pilots, flight attendants — could the quality of the applicants be slipping. A discussion thread on the article at airliners.net suggests that regional airlines are reducing their minimum hiring requirements and that the quality of new flight attendants is leaving something to be desired.

I think these articles are true. I’ve been with AA for 19 years, and the quality of many people hired in the past 7 years has steadily declined. I fly with flight attendants who NEVER would have been hired when I was hired. Although you can’t generalize, because there are some good ones out there, I have seen many a newer hired flight attendant sitting reading a book or magazine instead of answering call lights and taking care of passenger needs. If you say something to them, they always say, “They don’t pay me enough to do that!”

No wonder that in the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index released by University of Michigan this week, U.S. airlines scored 63 out of a possible 100. It’s their worst score in seven years and, to emphasize the point, nine points worse than the US federal government… and two points worse than the Internal Revenue Service. There’s something for the suits to put on their bonus justification write-ups.

I don’t know what’s going on with the flying public these days. Last month, it’s a woman lighting matches to cover body odor. Last Sunday, it’s a 28-year-old woman getting drunk and then breaking damn close to every rule in the air on a United flight from Boston to San Francisco. According to the article in today’s USAToday, she:

• Made mid-air cell phone calls
• Joked about a hijacking — “‘I’m calling 911 because the plane is being hijacked”
• Locked herself in the restroom with her dog
• Tried to make her way to the front door while saying “‘I’m getting off the aircraft”
• Yelled, cursed and spit on the flight attendants after being restrained

I’ve been flying between Chicago and San Francisco for almost a year straight, and have done the Boston to San Francisco route recently. It is a long flight, and if you haven’t planned ahead (or scored the rare upgrade), it’s a long time between meals. Something to keep in mind when the drink cart comes ’round.

I remember a similar incident on a flight from Cleveland to Chicago. One passenger was drunk and, on the approach to O’Hare, tried to leave early through the back door. The flight attendent and some passengers got the guy back into his seat. After landing, the Chicago police came on board, looked around and asked “Is anyone going to press charges?”. “I will,” said the flight attendant. Without a word, the cop grabbed the guy out of his seat, slammed him face first onto the floor of the plane, ‘cuffed him, and then dragged him down the stairs. And this was in the more gentle-and-sensitive pre-Sept 11th days. Keep that in mind then next time you’re ordering that double.

Tags: travel, travel story