Voice of the Customer, part 2: At Southwest Airlines, a Different Kind of Leadership
In my first installment of this two-parter (Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines) I peeled back the onion of a Newsweek Budget Travel blog-survey to reveal customer perceptions of two American airlines that are polar opposites of each other.
What drives such extreme differences in customer perceptions of Southwest and United?
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Report Card: Major Airlines Flunk Customer Care
by Charlie Leocha
www.ConsumerTraveler.com
Kate Hanni’s FlyersRights.org issued their 2009 Real Air Travel consumer Report Card yesterday at the Press Club in Washington DC. If I came home with a report card like this when I was a kid, I’d get a spanking.
The 2009 report card for tarmac delays of more than three hours gave all of the major airlines a “F” for their performance. The major legacy airlines themselves — American, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways — were graded as failing; their grades were lower when they were combined with their codeshare regional airline partners.
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When Outsourcing Kills: Colgan Air and Its Big 3 Partners
PBS’ Frontline unit has done a fascinating and disturbing bit of documentary journalism that tells the story of Colgan Air and the circumstances surrounding the crash of Continental flight 3407 in Buffalo, New York in February, 2009.
Colgan provides feeder services for United Airlines (as United Express), Continental (as Continental Connection), and US Airways (as US Airways Express), serving approximately 50 cities in the northeastern United States and Texas.
Click here to view the program in its entirety on the PBS site:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/view/
(You may also want to read the alarming comments of a United Airlines mechanic on the same page, who asserts several instances of serious, questionable maintenance practices at United’s mainline fleet.)
A total of 50 people (45 passengers; 2 crew members; 1 on the ground) lost their lives in the Colgan/ Continental incident, which was investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. NTSB concluded that the crash, first believed to have been caused by icing during bad weather, was avoidable; the root cause of the crash was determined to be operational errors by both pilots, almost certainly exacerbated by both inexperience and fatigue.
Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines
With this post, I begin a two-part mashup in order to make some points about leadership, employee relations, and service culture within the airline industry. I’ve touched upon this before, but my take on it this time introduces some new material; i.e., the observations of customers of two airlines (Southwest and United) in a recent Newsweek blog piece. This is part 1; let’s get started:
Last week, Newsweek’s Budget Travel blog invited its readers to weigh in with their perceptions of who the best and and worst airlines in the industry are. Have a look; there’s nothing scientific about the responses of course, but I thought it might be fun to quantify and summarize the results a bit, in a little “back-of-the-envelope” analysis that turned out to be pretty interesting.
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