Attention All Passengers (5 page)

Your Call Is Important to
Us

As for the O-word—
outsourcing
—there's no doubt it's had an ill effect on baggage
claims as well. In January 2011, Jaunted.com featured a long and detailed
article, “The Incandescent Incompetence of US Airways' Outsourced Baggage
Recovery Call Center,” which included this summation: “The short version is that
US Airways has an outsourced baggage recovery call center, almost certainly in
India, that's either unable or unwilling to give customers reliable information
or genuine assistance.” Ouch.

Occasionally, however, a high-profile case of
airline indifference focuses widespread attention on an uncaring industry. Enter
Dave Carroll, the Canadian musician whose Taylor 710 acoustic guitar was
manhandled at O'Hare International Airport when he was traveling from Halifax
through Chicago to a gig in Omaha in March 2008. As he and his bandmates were
settling into their seats on the connecting flight, a female passenger watching
the baggage being loaded suddenly exclaimed, “Oh my God, they're throwing
guitars outside!” The worst was confirmed in Omaha: Carroll's 710 was badly
damaged and written off—but his odyssey was just beginning.

What followed for Carroll was standard operating
procedure for millions of other airline passengers, the proverbial runaround
from the airline (in this case United) and what he terms “widespread
indifference.” There were long pauses between communications; his calls and
emails were seemingly ignored; he received a letter from the airline with no
name or return address; he sat on hold as his call was transferred to India.
United was far from contrite. He should have filed the claim within twenty-four
hours. There was nothing they could do. It was regretful. Ibid.

“If I was a lawyer I would have sued,” said
Carroll. “But instead I wrote a song.” And what a song. Last year “United Breaks
Guitars” passed eleven million views on YouTube and had been heard on U.S. and
Canadian television. In fact, I first encountered Carroll in 2009, when he
performed the unplugged version in the halls of the Rayburn House Office
Building at a forum on passenger rights issues.

Now in most cases, it would be fair to assume
Carroll's fifteen minutes have long expired, particularly after he followed up
his opus with two more ballads in the United trilogy. But his story transcends
his one-hit-wonder status and clearly taps into a wellspring of frustration and
anger at how airlines handle—or rather do
not
handle—complaints.

“I was really frustrated and I wasn't about to let
it end,” he explained. “I was trying to move an immovable object and when you do
that you only hurt yourself. I was throwing myself at a brick wall—but what if
this brick wall was sitting on a shaky foundation?” In fact, the most remarkable
aspect of Carroll's story is how shabbily United reacted even
after
he had become a bona fide North American
celebrity. “It was handled so poorly,” he said. “It should be what we learned in
kindergarten about right and wrong.”

This is no doubt why many question if the
dysfunction is intentionally built into airline customer service programs. In
other words, the airlines do
not
want to hear our
gripes and have constructed a byzantine system designed to thwart us from
pursuing our ultimate goal of customer satisfaction. It's not unlike the
panopticon, the eighteenth-century prison design for a structure in which guards
can view the inmates even though the incarcerated are unable to tell if they
themselves are being watched.

Why else would they remove human beings from the
airports and the call centers and ask you to write instead? Why else would they
outsource complaints to Southeast Asia, knowing that cultural differences could
impede your satisfaction? Why else would they impose fees if you choose to speak
to a human being? Why else would United shut down its telephone complaint center
and replace it with an email model? (A spokeswoman was quoted thus: “We did a
lot of research, we looked into it, and people who email or write us are more
satisfied with our responses.”) Why else would AlaskaAir.com channel distant
memories of artificial intelligence icon Max Headroom by introducing “Jenn, Your
Virtual Assistant”?

A world in which all airlines wish to respond
quickly to their customers' concerns would have no place for GetHuman.com, an
ingenious and at times invaluable site that provides shortcuts for those wishing
to speak to an actual person after dialing a toll-free number. For example,
here's the simple but secret way to bypass Delta's customer service Maginot
Line: “Press 0 at each prompt, ignoring messages.” What's more, GetHuman.com
provides typical wait times and user ratings as well (13.8 minutes for Delta,
which rates an “average”).

Stuck on the Tarmac with
You

In the fall of 2009 I took part in an
airline industry forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by the DOT. I spoke about a
troubling array of issues affecting airline passengers. At that forum Spirit
Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza and Republic Airways CEO Bryan Bedford spoke of their
confusion over the need for a Passenger Bill of Rights and asserted that
passengers could always “vote with their feet.” I responded that I had done just
that, by taking Amtrak to Washington that morning. Not everyone in the room was
amused.

The following summer, at the second full meeting of
the FAAC, I read a statement into the record to address the “vote with their
feet” issue, as if such a thing were possible at thirty-five thousand feet. I
noted that the nation's aviation infrastructure belongs to its citizens and
taxpayers, and that in many markets there is no meaningful choice, through
either lack of competition or airlines refusing to compete. What's more, the
federal preemption rule and the industry's no-nonsense safety and security
regulations don't allow for much consumer debate.

I had long been a journalist fighting for
passengers, but by late 2009 my work for Consumers Union was pulling me further
in the direction of passenger advocacy. I soon found it was becoming a rather
crowded field.

Kate Hanni had no legal, political, or aviation
experience when she became a national symbol of the passenger rights movement.
She was an American Airlines passenger who endured a horrific fifty-seven-hour
ordeal, with nine of those hours spent on a tarmac in Austin, Texas, alongside
her husband and two children in 2006. There was no water or food, the lavatories
overflowed, passengers became sick, and Hanni felt trapped—again. Six months
earlier she had suffered an attempted rape and murder and, Hanni explained, “In
a way I was the worst person to do this to. I was not going to be a victim
again.”

She went on to establish what evolved into
FlyersRights.org and soon became a ubiquitous presence in the media. And she
deserves credit for lobbying DOT secretary LaHood to eventually impose the
“three-hour rule” in 2009, which requires that planes operated by major airlines
return to the gate within that time frame if departure is not imminent (the DOT
later expanded the rule to include smaller carriers and foreign airlines).

But there are those who feel the government—and
particularly LaHood's DOT—is overreaching through such actions. Brett Snyder is
an airline veteran who spent time at America West and United before launching an
online discussion forum while working for PriceGrabber.com. Eventually he spun
it off into The Cranky Flier blog, where “the guiding principle is what I find
interesting.” Much of Snyder's focus recently has been on customer service, but
he doesn't echo the legion of passenger rights advocates—in fact, he often
criticizes them—I mean, us. He explains: “The government feels the need to step
in on the airline industry more so than in other industries. Part of it is a
legacy thing. . . . What I object to are the things that will create
more problems than they will solve, like tarmac delays. With the three-hour
tarmac rule, you'll have a greater number of people inconvenienced than not.
That's my concern.”

A few years ago I might have agreed with him. In
fact, I took quite a few lumps for being the only passenger advocate who lobbied
against
tarmac delay legislation back in 2007.
In my USAToday.com column that year I wrote: “It's tough to decide how best to
fix airline customer service. That's why I have such mixed feelings about
Congress micro-managing flight operations. The journalist who fights for
passenger rights has been waging an internal battle with the ex-dispatcher who
knows that even large doses of outside assistance will not necessarily correct
systemic airline operations problems.”

But my fence straddling ended in September 2009,
when I attended a passenger forum cosponsored by Senator Barbara Boxer of
California. That morning the public heard from dozens of passengers who had
encountered lengthy and inexcusable tarmac delays, as well as from passenger
rights advocates and legislators. But not a single sitting airline executive
attended, and even the industry's primary lobbying group—the Air Transport
Association—declined the invite.

That day it became apparent to me that if the
airlines refused even to
listen
to passengers, then
they deserved whatever regulation and/or legislation Washington deemed
appropriate. Even those who oppose the three-hour mandate acknowledge that the
airlines—both individually and collectively—repeatedly muffed the chance to
promote an alternative policy,
any
alternative
policy. Analyst Bob Mann, who maintains the DOT rule could inconvenience tens of
thousands of passengers, also declares, “The airlines were derelict, no
question.”

Michael Levine, a law professor and former airline
executive, is a strong proponent of free-market solutions, but even he
acknowledges this dichotomy: “I think the airlines have an odd mixture of
political sophistication and naïveté. They certainly have an extensive lobbying
effort and they know how to deploy their executives on Capitol Hill on issues.
But often their choice of issues and their response to issues just doesn't
reflect what anyone who would step back from the politics would suggest they
do.”

As someone who once was responsible for creating,
delaying, consolidating, and canceling dozens of flights a day as a flight
operations manager, I can tell you that not all passenger needs are the same;
when a long delay is announced, some will want to leave the aircraft or perhaps
even leave the airport, while others will want to wait it out on board and hope
for the best. In addition, the destination and flight length are critical
components. At the Pan Am Shuttle on days when LaGuardia was particularly backed
up, we would board passengers at the gate and then drop the aft staircase
embedded into the Boeing 727 and allow customers to leave at will. (That same
727 aft staircase, by the way, is what allowed famed hijacker D. B. Cooper to
parachute out over Washington state with his loot.) The new tarmac regulations
are not perfect, but they do provide enough flexibility to accommodate both
types of passengers.

“Nobody should be required to sit on an airplane
for more than three hours,” says former American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall.
“From a public relations point of view, [the airlines] were completely
tone-deaf. Moreover, the airlines and the airports have resisted and those
problems can be easily resolved. This whole nonsense about canceling flights.
Bullshit. I'm not going to cancel a flight. I've been in this conga line now for
two and a half hours. . . . Anybody wants to get off, get off. End of
discussion.”

Where I do agree with Snyder is that the focus on
tarmac delays has seemed to overshadow much larger passenger issues. In 2010,
shortly after the DOT enacted the new rules, the head of a large domestic
airline said to me off the record: “You got your tarmac delay rules, what do you
want now?” That's not to detract from the experiences of those who have been
trapped on airplanes and not provided water, food, and lavatories for hours on
end. But those passengers make up an infinitesimally small statistic; meanwhile,
the rights of tens of thousands of passengers are abused every week owing to
“routine” overbookings and flight delays and cancellations. Snyder says, “I
agree. There are very few people impacted by tarmac delays. And a lot more are
impacted by other factors every day.”

“We Owe Him Nothing”

Some carriers actually seem to embrace
their public disregard for passengers. Take Spirit Airlines. A
USA Today
profile in 2009 quoted Ben Baldanza
referring to his company as “the McDonald's of the airline industry.” It also
referenced the infamous tale of Baldanza accidentally responding directly to a
customer's email requesting a refund for a flight delay; Baldanza had written:
“Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I'm concerned. Let
him tell the world how bad we are. He's never flown us before anyway and will be
back when we save him a penny.” Meanwhile, the DOT repeatedly levies fines
against Spirit for false advertising and failing to provide bottom-line pricing
inclusive of fees.

An employee at Spirit recently told me about a
warning from a Spirit veteran: “If you want to succeed here you're going to have
to forget everything you learned at other airlines.” My friends Larry Bleidner
and Irene Zutell are frequent flyers between their home in Los Angeles and their
families on the East Coast, but even they were shocked when they attempted to
save a few bucks on Spirit. Although they encountered five-hour delays in both
directions, they were never provided updates, explanations, or apologies, and
they watched as their delayed flight simply rolled off the information display
screen near the gate as the pilot shrugged. Bleidner says, “The misery index was
like on a New York City subway stuck in a tunnel—but that's back when it was a
buck. You'd expect at least a modicum of respect from an airline.” On another
journey, Zutell was horrified to spend five hours on the tarmac with her young
daughter while an inoperative lavatory was fixed: “They stuck us on a plane for
five hours so they could fix a bathroom for a two-hour flight. Even my
five-year-old knew it didn't make sense.”