Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘American Airlines’

The last of the major airlines to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy, American Airlines is reportedly http://nyti.ms/yKLPAc on Delta Air Lines/TPG Capital’s radar for acquisition. In case you are not aware Delta Airlines is now the world’s largest airline. US Airways is also considering a bid. What I first thought was ‘how far the mighty have fallen’.

I was never a huge fan of American Airlines but that’s mainly because I had a few bad experiences a number of years ago that made my shy away from them whenever possible. Today that’s an impractical approach to air travel as trying to avoid an airline only serves to offer the customer fewer options and likely higher prices.

Flying commercial airlines in the U.S. today is akin to getting on a bus or train. Few airlines distinguish themselves and if you are flying economy they all appear to be the same to me. Remember Jet Blue and their original appeal? Leather seats, individual Direct TV in your seat and snacks that were a bit different than other airlines. Jet Blue also tried to be fun with glib flight attendants and pilots. Today Jet Blue (to me) is pretty much just another airline. The leather seats are nice but wearing a bit. The Direct TV thing is pretty good but I’ve been on flights where my individual screen did not work.

Is there any domestic airline that distinguishes itself? Virgin America has made a concerted effort although their fares are notably higher than the competition. Since the airlines have decided to make air travel akin to mass transit it’s a game where the lowest fare wins and damn everything else. In fact I don’t know about you but I’ve noticed that most (not all) flight attendants seem to just be going through the motions and look like they’d rather be someplace else. The airlines constant labor disputes and troubles have taken away flight attendant’s smiles.

There are a host of well-known and not so well-known aggregators and an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal highlighted the craziness when it comes to fare shopping – http://on.wsj.com/xJ9qdQ. Also this week in a response to sites like Kayak, Priceline and Travelocity, the several airlines introduced a collective fare buying platform of their own that will launch later this year. This is in response to the airlines dissatisfaction with the aggregators taking too large a portion of the airfares for the airlines’ liking.

The race to offer the lowest price with the least amount of service appears sure to continue.
If you have a favorite airline is it only because of the ability to stockpile miles and rewards? Or do you really have a favorite airline because you perceive that airline to be better?

Everyone I know that flies a lot has their own horror stories to tell. Everyone that has a mobile phone or mobile broadband service has complained about their carrier. While my experiences with American Airlines and Verizon yesterday would not necessarily fall under the ‘horror story’ category, they did illustrate how not to handle a customer.

Our flight back to LaGuardia from Raleigh, NC started out innocently enough (I was with our Executive VP and Creative Director Nader Ashway). We were seated and ready to go when an announcement from the cockpit informed us that there were mechanical difficulties with the aircraft and they were going to try to fix it but we would be better off getting off the plane and waiting in the gate area.

We immediately got on the long line to find out what were our options for other flights to LaGuardia. Note – when you sit near the back of even a small aircraft it becomes a bad thing since you end up with fewer options. We had not considered this when booking. We will next time. By the time we got to the counter our flight had been fully cancelled and our options were –standby list on two later flights and a ‘guaranteed’ seat on the flight to LaGuardia that was scheduled to leave four hours after our original flight. There were few if any announcements in the gate area informing displaced passengers of what was going on.

American blew an opportunity to make a little hay out of adversity. All of us know that sometimes planes have equipment problems and safety first must be the #1 policy. But the communication was so non-existent that I could simply not believe it. I booked electronically and American Airlines has my mobile number, my email and they have to know what happens to any passenger at any given moment. Not one communication have I received from American Airlines – nearly 24 hours later!

How about the idea of offering all displaced passengers complimentary access to the Admiral’s Club until they could be rebooked? For people that have never been in that club it might even convince them to join. Talk about a missed opportunity. For those that have been in there at least they would feel acknowledged that a problem (not weather related) occurred and American Airlines at least tried to do what they could. Offering me a seat on a flight four hours later did nothing to serve this customer.

Only because I am a glutton for punishment I then decided to use the time to repair my Verizon wireless modem card that had been acting up. I called the number and a helpful woman in Georgia named Angela tried to help me get the card back up and working since I had money on the card and wanted to get online.

After rebooting my machine two times and trying everything else under the sun for 45 minutes (draining my mobile phone battery in the process), Angela told me that she needed to fill out a ‘trouble ticket’ with a case number. And it would ‘only’ take 5-10 minutes. What? How does this serve me – the customer? I already had been dragged through a series of protocols that simply established that Verizon’s modem was defective. Now I have to wait for them to fill out a trouble ticket? But having invested 50 minutes into the call I was compelled to wait and see it through. At the close of the call (I was pushing hard to get off the phone to save what little battery I had left), I was told I would get a SMS text message with the ‘trouble ticket’ information. You guessed it. I am still waiting for that text and my mobile card still does not work.

Verizon has that age-old message at the start of a service call – ‘This call may be monitored for customer service”. I don’t think that they are really listening at all do you?

Actually I am convinced that airlines can and will try to get away with everything they can. For instance I am traveling on American to the west coast next week and decided to change my flight from the redeye on Wednesday night to the redeye on Tuesday night. I fully anticipated having to pay the fee to change. A change fee of $ 150 mind you. Not thrilling me when the entire discounted fare was $ 267 roundtrip!

However that’s not the rub. Somehow since I am on a discounted fare I have to pay the fare difference since it is inside a different fare price time frame when it would be more expensive to book the flight now than when we did 2 weeks ago. Huh? Wha? The idea being that if I booked the fare today for next week it would cost more than $ 267 round trip. Ok I get that. But I am changing the return time only and changing nothing else. The exact same origination, exact same itinerary.

So now the fare difference plus the change fee makes the change worth $ 339.00. That’s right the cost to change my flight one-way is MORE than the cost of the original round-trip flight itself. Kind of makes my head want to explode! But wait friends, there’s more. Oh yes there’s definitely more. Let’s say that I booked the flight and somehow in the interim period the actual fare went down. You’d think that I’d pay the change fee ($ 150) and then the difference would be credited back. But noooooo! The airlines don’t do that. It’s a one way street folks and you know which side of the street the customers are on.

I wish Southwest would have offered a flight that worked for me here. They don’t do the additional fee hustle and somehow they make money. No frills perhaps but no BS either. And while I am singling out American (they’ve incurred my wrath before), Delta and Continental do the same things for the most part.

What choices do we have? Not many. I fully realize that $ 267.00 roundtrip is a very low fare – below market even. How can an airline fly me back and forth in this day and age for $ 133.50 each way? I mean a $ 200 round trip fare in 1980 to the coast was an amazing bargain even then. What really toasts my bagels is that most people (including me) don’t really know what the risks are when you buy a cheap fare. And that’s just what the major carriers are counting on.

Air travel is now nothing more than Greyhound in the air and that’s obvious but somehow the carriers would like us to think it’s better than that.

All I can hope for now is to be happy I avoided the hated middle seat on a 6 hour flight. Since at a low fare that’s what’s coming next. Low fare = middle seat. You want an aisle or window – reach for the credit card. It’s coming folks, get ready for it.

Rant over. Or help me rant on?

Last night we picked up our teenage daughter from LaGuardia airport. She came in from Central America through Miami to LaGuardia (LGA). Originating as an international flight but they went through customs in Miami so the leg to LGA was domestic.

It was a bad weather night in the New York metropolitan area with thundershowers all day and heavy downpours. We knew the flight would be delayed and American Airlines updated the flight status dutifully all afternoon on their site as well as through opted-in reminders we subscribed to. It was frustrating for all of us that the flight was delayed more than two hours but pretty good use of communication overall by American Airlines.

The same cannot be said of the baggage handling at LGA. The baggage claim at LGA is not run by American Airlines or any other airline as it is unionized and the handlers are employed independently. Moreover we got into baggage claim and there were hundreds of people milling about with no signage indicating where the baggage was to be claimed. However there were a number of ancient but blank video screens.

We stood at one baggage carousel talking for ten minutes with another family whose son was on the same flight. Finally my wife (she’s the proactive one here) suspected something was not right and found out that in fact baggage from our flight was at a carousel at the other end of baggage claim. Still without any indication but she found someone who seemed to have an idea.

Then we learned that the baggage was being off-loaded to two carousels. So we had to split and have one of us at one, one of us at the other and the third standing on long line for reporting lost baggage as after 45 minutes we had begun to lose hope.

Finally my wife spotted our daughter’s bag and we were able to leave just as I was about to enter the office to report the bag lost.

Aside from this situation proving that carry-on is the only way to go (not an option when you are backpacking for three weeks), I was shocked, disgusted and disturbed that in one of the world’s busiest airports, the baggage handling was among the worst I’ve ever seen. Believe me when I tell you that Hanoi, Vietnam was cleaner and with better signage than La Guardia.

People that travel into NYC hate LaGuardia. Is it any wonder why? How does this show off my hometown to visitors from other countries? Or those that live in the United States?