Bad passenger attitudes are the biggest obstacles facing air carriers, according to a recently completed annual study. This study comes just after the release of information claiming airlines are taking the hassle out of flying and delivering their best performances in four years.
“This job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers,” said Randal Graves, customer service vice-president for U.S. Airways.
From bumbling back-country fliers taking their first post-Sept. 11 flights to high-maintenance upgrade-seekers, fliers are driving most airline employees nuts. The only respite from overly entitled passengers squawking their constant demands are younger eco-travelers.
“We’ve found that backpackers, despite dread-locks that stink up the cabin, are laid-back and less-demanding of gate, cabin and luggage staff,” said Mike Kitchens, a spokesman for a private research firm that studied how big of a pain in the butt customers are for airline employees. “We also found that business-class passengers reduced their whininess by five percent for the 2008 fiscal year.”
The study was released Tuesday, rating U.S.-based legacy carriers and select international carriers. Regional carriers were not surveyed, as both passengers and staff members consider the niche a lost cause on both sides of the satisfaction issue. According to Aeroflot spokesman Leonid Kuhlyevski, the Russian giant did not participate in the “decadent Western survey.”
“You do not fly Aeroflot,” said Kuhlyevski. “Aeroflot fly you!”
Among legacy carriers, cabin crew complaints are at 7.45 per 10 passengers, up from 6.2 per 10 in FY07. Southwest Airlines crews logged the largest number of complaints due to smirking passengers [...]
April, 2009:
Airlines See Declines in Customer Performance
My Top 5 Flights – Plus, a Site for Flight Geeks
The rise of Facebook as a great time-waster is pretty well-documented, and now aviation geeks have their own way to flush hours down the lavatory: Let me introduce FlightMemory.com, a Web site that lets you input all your commercial flights. It then tracks your time and mileage and plots it on a map. You can even order a poster based on your flight paths. (Thanks to Things in the Sky for the discovery.)
What’s kind of useful is that you can choose to enter the bare-minimum of details, or delve into
excruciating detail about every single thing the airline, TSA and airport employees did wrong – or you can praise them for those times when “customer service” isn’t a punchline.
I’m still working on getting my flights in, but I’ve made some headway. It’s quite a lot of fun, especially since it appears to be of German origin and translated by members of The Scorpions while they were on tour with Van Halen circa 1985 (“We can now offer you some new thingies for your pleasure – introducing the FlightMemory shop!” … tell me you couldn’t hear Klaus Meine saying that!).
