Attention All Passengers (2 page)

Ronald Reagan was lauded for two things above all: downsizing government and simplifying complex issues. So for a moment let's follow his example. Here's an easy way to consider if you truly want to get government completely off corporate backs. Don't view this as an abstract political, economic, or academic concept worthy of a robust debate. Instead make it personal. Take whomever you love most—adult, child, pet—and then strap that loved one into a pressurized aluminum tube, to be hurtled through the troposphere at four-fifths the speed of sound, roughly 550 miles per hour. And all the while, trust that this airplane was serviced properly, with no shortcuts, in a suitable facility with competent, licensed mechanics who understood their work and were screened by security and for alcohol and drug use. Trust that the crew was trained properly and is earning a living wage. Trust completely in the oversight of the airline executives du jour who show loyalty only to shareholders and have golden parachutes for themselves.

Then ask yourself if you wouldn't maybe like a few inspectors to double-check their efforts. You may find that you don't have that much faith in Corporate America after all.

1

Sit Down and Shut Up
or We'll Turn This Plane Around:

Why Airline Service Has
Collapsed and Air Rage Is Soaring

Hi, I'm Jenn, your virtual assistant
for the Alaska Airlines Web site. If you need help or have a question, simply
type it below.

—AlaskaAir.com

F
or many
airline passengers, a big fear is that our checked luggage will turn up in a
place most of us have never heard of—a place like, say, Scottsboro, Alabama. In
fact, that's exactly what has happened with millions of suitcases over the
years. According to federal regulations, the airlines have ninety days to
reunite passengers and lost bags, and they usually manage to do it. However, on
Day 91 a large truck will tote the unwanted belongings off to the Unclaimed
Baggage Center. Before long, your iPod, your paperback Harlequin, and even your
underwear will be up for sale.

You have to really work to find the Unclaimed
Baggage Center (UBC), because Scottsboro is not convenient for anyone outside of
northeastern Alabama (and is primarily known as the site of the infamous and
racially charged “Scottsboro Boys” trial in the 1930s). The nearest commercial
airport is a distant forty miles away in Huntsville. The UBC has been
dispatching trucks to airline bag facilities since 1970 and now works
exclusively with all major domestic carriers. Once the goodies arrive sight
unseen in Scottsboro, they're unlocked, unpacked, sorted, and cleaned (UBC
boasts of laundering more loads than anyone in Alabama); then 100 employees
stock 5,000 to 7,000 items on the shelves every day. Here's the breakdown: 40
percent of what's found inside the bags goes to charity, 30 percent is recycled
or tossed out, and the remaining 30 percent fills the 40,000-square-foot retail
store in Scottsboro.

Talk about a niche market. There are a few wannabes
along Willow Street, but you can't miss UBC's giant neon suitcase. Since there
are no online transactions, the parking lot boasts license plates from around
the South (830,000 visitors in 2010). And UBC—which perhaps fittingly abuts a
cemetery—has become a bona fide tourist attraction, the type you learn about in
brochures stocked in the lobby of the Days Inn up at Highway 35.

Inside, you'll encounter everything imaginable. As
you roam the endless aisles, you'll find more ski boots than at Sports
Authority, more cameras than at Best Buy, and more bras than at Victoria's
Secret. There are crossbows and arrows. A full set of weights. A digital drum
set. You can pick up a Balzac short story collection for a buck. Sure,
occasionally there will be a quirky, newsworthy treasure: a 41-karat emerald, a
full suit of armor, a 1934 French newspaper, a shofar, a hand-hammered cross.
But UBC sold four thousand iPods last year, the supply of baby strollers and
baggage wheelies is endless, and new wedding dresses arrive every day. The
feeling I have gazing at a toddler's Scooby Doo clogs is not unlike viewing NTSB
accident scene photos: Who were all these passengers? And why didn't someone
want that oversized photo of Mickey Mantle back?

“The airlines get a bad rap,” said Brenda Cantrell,
UBC's director of marketing, when we sat down just as Alabama was recovering
from its worst snowfall in a decade. She acknowledged that many passengers feel
the airlines don't care, but said she supports her supply chain: “I think they
do the best that they can.” In fairness, Cantrell also pointed out the high
incidence of passenger fraud, since many dishonest airline customers do
not
want their bags returned; dirty socks be damned if
an insurance claim for jewelry and electronics is approved instead. An old
airline maxim: Every lost watch was a Rolex, every necklace was from
Tiffany's.

As for baggage fees, Cantrell is no fan, since they
are just about the worst thing that ever happened to the UBC business model:
“It's definitely in decline because more people are not checking bags.” But
despite the long odds, imagine her satisfaction when a suitcase was pried open
recently and inside was clothing still price tagged by UBC—come full circle.

As for how the airlines are doing, this is one
aspect of customer service in which they are not completely at fault, because in
November 2002 the industry happily abdicated responsibility for baggage
screening to the federal government, and specifically to the newly formed
Transportation Security Administration. For Free Market versus Government
watchers, this was epic. The result? According to the U.S. Department of
Transportation's monthly mishandled baggage reports, such filings soared after
the TSA took over and air traffic started picking up again after 9/11. There
were 3.84 mishandled bag reports per 1,000 passengers in 2002, and that number
rose every year for six consecutive years, before peaking at 7.05 in 2007, just
prior to the economic collapse of 2008 and the resulting drop in passengers.

One aspect the DOT stats do not fully capture is
customer satisfaction, and how the airlines respond when passengers complain
about what the DOT terms “lost, damaged, pilfered, and stolen” luggage. That's
why it's worth noting that after the TSA started screening bags the DOT's
monthly database of consumer complaints saw a marked spike in gripes generated
by baggage handling. In fact, as a percentage of total grievances, complaints
over luggage nearly tripled between the summers of 2002 and 2004.

I wrote about this topic after numerous arrests of
TSA screeners for pilfering were reported in Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Miami,
New Orleans, New York City, and Philadelphia (and famous victims such as Chevy
Chase and Joan Rivers made the news). By September 2004, the TSA finally
addressed the mounting backlog of complaints by adjudicating more than 17,600
passenger filings, at about $110 each, for “property damaged or lost when their
checked baggage was screened for explosives.”

Now that more passengers are flying again, the
number of mishandled bags is increasing again. SITA, a Geneva-based aviation
communications organization, released Baggage Report 2011 and confirmed that an
increase in passenger traffic has led to a 6 percent increase in mishandled
baggage, with North America among the regions “most affected.” However, there
are important points to be made that highlight systemic problems with baggage
handling.

“Baggage has never been a priority for airlines,”
says Scott Mueller, an expert on the topic. “If the airlines were held
accountable, then at least they would refund the fee if the bag is mishandled.”
Mueller is a man with a passion for reuniting passengers and their baggage. He's
a seventeen-year industry veteran who headed up baggage services for Midwest
Airlines, and during one five-year stretch not a single passenger on his carrier
filed a complaint over mishandled bags.

For one thing, the rate of checked bags has
decreased since U.S. airlines began charging fees for this service, so this
factor needs to be considered when comparing mishandled baggage rates across
several years.

These DOT monthly statistics on mishandled baggage
are problematic. For starters, it's a self-reporting system, and traditionally
airlines have not posted an impressive track record under such programs. I know
from firsthand experience that airlines can be “creative” with their flight
delay reporting, and there is ample evidence that self-reporting safety issues
to the FAA has not worked well. As Mueller explains, “The DOT does have the
right to do a random audit. They
can
do that, but I
don't think it's a high priority. You can easily fudge your numbers.”

In addition, he notes the statistics are skewed
because the DOT's monthly rankings are based on
passengers
boarded
, not
baggage checked
. Mueller
states: “The end results are based on the assumption that all 1,000 passengers
that board an airplane checked a bag. Now if only 500 passengers out of 1,000
who board an aircraft actually checked a bag, then the airline's statistic of
4.5 bags mishandled per 1,000 passengers boarded would actually be double.”
What's more, there are four classifications of mishandled baggage—lost, damaged,
delayed, and pilfered—but airlines are not required to break out the percentages
on these subcategories, so consumers do not know if Airline A has a rampant
problem with baggage break-ins while Airline B has a chronic issue with losing
bags.

Mueller is equally critical of the TSA and the
airlines. At Midwest, pilferage claims quadrupled after the government assumed
responsibility for screening, and he has seen TSA employees stealing in Orlando.
He explains that the TSA is the only entity authorized to open a passenger's
checked bag, and in many cases such screening is performed in a private room
with only two employees, a scenario conducive to theft.

Then there is the customer service component.
Passenger rights advocate Kate Hanni says, “The way the airlines handle claims
is they summarily reject them the first time through. It's a real racket.
There's no pressure on them to make the system better for passengers.” Mueller
concurs, and says this “absolutely” happens every day: “There definitely are a
lot of claims that fall on deaf ears.”

However, a bigger issue is that most passengers are
playing in a rigged game without having read the fine print about how to file,
when to file, and where to file a claim when their bag and/or its contents is
missing or damaged. “There are a lot of issues with how bag claims are filed,”
explains Mueller. “The airlines don't do a good job of explaining all this to
their customers. People always say, ‘How am I supposed to know that?' Well, you
bear the burden.”

Considering all the problems passengers encounter
with checked luggage, it's worth noting that baggage agreements don't cover
carry-ons left behind in the aircraft cabin; carriers are
not
required to ensure that the BlackBerry you tucked into the
seatback pocket finds its way back to you. “The airline has no responsibility
whatsoever,” Mueller says. “It's considered lost-and-found. Chances are you
won't see it again.” He notes that his employees have found watches, cameras,
laptops, and even $3,600 in cash in the cabins of empty airplanes—but not all
airline and outsourced workers do the right thing. In fact, some do the absolute
wrong thing, as was made clear by a news story that hit the wires in the summer
of 2010. French police arrested a forty-seven-year-old Air France flight
attendant named “Lucie R.” and charged her with stealing thousands of dollars in
cash and jewelry from passengers while they slept.

In March 2011, Congressman Michael Capuano, a
Massachusetts Democrat, introduced legislation that would “require refunds [of
fees] for baggage that is lost, damaged, or delayed.” The
Congressional Record
shows that after ten minutes of debate, the
“Capuano Amendment” was defeated on a voice vote. Interestingly, around that
time I received an internal document prepared by the Air Transport Association,
renamed Airlines for America (A4A), addressing talking points on the Capuano
Amendment. Here's the airline trade group's reasoning: “The amendment is
unnecessary given [the] historically low mishandled bag rate and competing
baggage handling and fee policies.” Huh? Carriers are charging customers for a
service they are not providing—prompt and safe delivery of your luggage. How is
this affected by the overall mishandling record or “competing” fee policies? One
month later, Secretary LaHood announced this policy had been adopted by the DOT,
Congress be damned. But unfortunately, refunding fees won't improve airline
baggage handling.

Declining Customer Concern in a
“Service Industry”

The airlines claim that the number of
passengers who are inconvenienced is quite small considering the millions
carried. But beleaguered passenger Dave Carroll notes that such percentages
don't mean much to those whom the system fails: “You have airline executives who
quote statistics—but they don't seem to care about those on the margins of the
statistics.” He adds, “If there's no integrity in the policies, then it's open
season.”

Of course, few carriers are competing on customer
service these days. Charlie Leocha of the Consumer Travel Alliance explains: “As
the low-cost carriers and as the comparability made everyone more competitive,
the first thing to go was differentiation in customer service. It's not only
executive management—it runs through the fabrics of the companies. The managers,
the gate agents, the flight attendants working without contracts. The front-line
employees are under the most stress.”

For airline passengers in recent years, customer
service has gotten worse. That's not opinion—that's documented fact. According
to statistics, there have been more mishandled bags (despite the added baggage
fees), more consumer complaints, more congestion, and more passengers bumped off
flights.

But other key elements of poor customer service
can't be encapsulated in statistics, though they have been captured by dozens of
polls, surveys, and rankings. In June 2011, for example, a
Consumer Reports
survey of fifteen thousand readers found a “low
opinion of today's flying experience.”

There is so much bad juju surrounding airline
customer service that sometimes I need to step back and wonder if hyperbole is
overtaking reality. Could so many pissed-off passengers possibly be wrong?
Luckily, one of the best barometers I know happens to be a trusted friend and
colleague. Linda Burbank was the ombudsman for
Consumer
Reports Travel Letter
when I was editor, and a few years later she
joined me at USAToday.com, where she continues to serve as a consumer travel
advocate. I've seen the way she fights for readers who have been wronged by
airlines and other travel companies. (On behalf of a
CRTL
reader, Burbank once secured a $29,833 refund from Royal
Caribbean and Expedia, an unprecedented action from the laissez-faire and
largely unregulated cruise industry.)