Sometimes a little poor customer service is enough to ruin your day. Sometimes that poor customer service seems to compound like everyone is ganging up on you. That’s what happened yesterday.
The airline industry does not have the best reputation for their customer service to begin with. However, you would think with some of the larger gaffes of late and those being shared via blogs and microblogs that the airlines would start singing a different tune.
Misty and I were headed to Phoenix to stay with some friends for a long weekend and take in some Spring Training baseball. We purposefully chose an afternoon flight so that we could work the better part of the day before departing. Our flight was scheduled for 5:30pm departure on US Airways. We live relatively close to the airport and we had not only checked in online, but we also purchased to check a bag online. Our first stop was the off-site parking lot. The bus picked us up, then circled the parking lot two more times waiting for others to shuttle to the airport. It was about 10 minutes of circling and picking up other passengers. As luck would have it, one of the passengers was flying on Southwest Airlines, so the first stop was going to be the East Terminal. Finally we made it to the main terminal. We still had to physically check in our luggage and wile in line for that the US Airways computers went down.
As we found out, this is crippling for the airlines. There is no backup plan. There is nothing that they can do. They can’t check in passengers, they can’t check in baggage…nothing. And Judy S., the US Airways representative there was quick to tell anyone on our Phoenix flight that there was nothing she could do for us. By this time we were about 45 minutes before departure. Judy’s main message was telling the Phoenix passengers, “this is why we tell you to arrive 2 hours before your flight”. If you have flown through STL lately you know what a ghost town that airport has been. Who knew that there was a rush of people leaving this city at the end of the workday on a Thursday. We figured arriving, at what we expected to be, an hour before the flight would allow us ample time to make our flight. It always had in the past.
Suddenly at 5:02 the computers started working again. Judy grabbed our boarding passes and IDs and printed off baggage claims. Of course in STL you still have to take your luggage elsewhere to be scanned and sent on to your plane. Heaven forbid they use that conveyor belt behind the ticketing counter!
We thought we were in the clear. 30 minutes to get from ticketing to the plane seemed like plenty of time in this typically-deserted airport. We made our way downstairs and turned the corner headed towards TSA and were amazed to see a line that stretched halfway down the hall. “Shit!”, there is no way we are getting through this line in time. There is a policy in STL that we learned, they will not move people up in the line if there is a flight about to depart. I know that other airports will do this, because I have been on both sides of it. If a flight is about to depart someone excercises some superior customer service and trolls the line looking for poor travelers who are stuck in line. A quick check of the boarding pass confirms the passenger indeed needs some intervention to make their flight and for the most part the passengers who are being “jumped in line” understand. Not the case in STL! We stood in the line for nearly 30 minutes. Once finally through the line we grabbed our belongings, didn’t even bother to put our shoes on and tore through the A Concourse.
All for not.
The door to the plane had just been closed and there was no way that the gate agent was going to open that door. Let me interject here that it was not just the two of us who missed our flights. There were six of us in all in the same circumstance. So that means that there were likely 6 seats open on that flight now.
We stood there staring at our plane, still connected to the gate bridge, just a short throw from where we stood. No sympathy, no desire to help us feel better about the situation, just “I am busy right now, I’ll be with you in a few minutes” from Reginald the gate attendant.
I understand that there are rules and regulations that are set in place for a reason. But we all know that there are ways to accommodate the consumer, to make the travel experience better and neither US Airways or TSA had any interest in making our experience any better.
Here’s what burns me the most. It was crab-ass Judy at ticketing. She spent her time standing in front of the passengers while we waited for their crippling computer shut-down to reboot telling us what we did wrong. It was our responsibility to plan for “things like this to happen”. You know what she should have been doing? Calling down to the gate agent at A16 and letting them know “there are 6 passengers in line that are trying to make that flight. The computers were down, we just got their luggage checked and they are on their way. Is there any way to hold the flight for them?” We all know that airlines are also not known for their on-time arrivals. Waiting an additional 5 minutes to accommodate their paying customers (time which is easy to make up in the air) would have been a much better solution. A solution I would expect (or at least the attempt) by a company that invests in customer service.
Instead this is now public. I started with a couple microblog posts on twitter while this was transpiring. First booing Judy and her poor attitude, then reaching out to US Airways asking for them to delay flight 244. I don’t think they were listening. In this “new” social world you had better be on your best behavior as you represent a company. It is easy to be heard as a disgruntled customer. US Airways did more harm than good yesterday by employing someone with a horrible attitude and letting her be the face and voice of their company. My money is hard-earned. I have choices on where I will spend it. Bad experiences make my decisions easier by eliminating choices.
1 comment:
That's a dreadful story. Sadly, I find it to be typical. I have been humiliated by a surly airline attendant for taking an empty seat across the aisle (after seeing that no other passengers were boarding, but before the cabin door was closed) so that the elderly man beside me who was very upset that he could not sit with his wife could be beside her; treated as if I am a thorn in the side of air travel when I request that my seat be moved so that I am not next to a person with a cat on a 6-hr flight (I am severely allergic); chided by security for "taking too long" while trying to get 3 small children and a stroller through security alone; dismissed for asking for compensation when my flights did not connect because of mechanical trouble delays because "There was also some bad weather so we would have been late anyway due to an act of God"... and the list goes on and on. Too many airline and airport personnel seem to treat customers as a necessary evil, not the source of the dollars that keep them employed. I used to enjoy airline travel, but over the past few years I find that I pay more and more, yet get treated with less and less common courtesy (and have less and less legroom). I hope that social media begins to have an effect and improve the abysmal current state of the air travel experience.
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