“United Breaks Guitars,” Song 3: Rhapsody in Bluegrass
As promised, Dave Carroll has released the third and final song of his United Breaks Guitars trilogy. In a special webcast event that happened live last night (recorded & available here; things gets started at about 04:30), Dave introduced the last video and spent another 45 minutes or so telling a more complete, behind-the-scenes story of both his broken Taylor guitar and United Airlines’ profoundly broken customer service organization.
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“Dude, Where’s My Upgrade?” Why More Fliers with Miles and Status Get Stuck in Coach
by Janice Hough
www.ConsumerTraveler.com
While airlines like to promote free tickets with their mileage programs, the award that many even semi-regular clients want is an upgrade. These are the very awards that are getting harder to get.
At a time when flying has increasingly become an ordeal, an upgrade can often make the difference between a very pleasant and a miserable, cramped experience. Personally, give me a good book and an occasional glass of wine and I find flying in business class a mini-vacation.
Over the years, I’ve often had to waitlist upgrades for clients at the time of booking; generally, with enough advance notice, they clear. At least they used to.
These days, I have had clients waitlist 10 months in advance with no luck. Even elite fliers with 100,000 mile a year haven’t been upgraded on flights with over 40 business class seats left at the time of booking. Especially on transatlantic and transpacific flights.
Now this doesn’t mean upgrades never happen. But they’re a lot harder to count on getting. So what’s happened?
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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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Deconstructing United Airlines: Customers are Mere Transactions
by Paul Greenberg
blogs.ZDNet.com
If you’re a loyalty marketer and look at my United profile, you find something that would make you 4.5 on a scale of 5.0 when it comes to warm and fuzzy. You’d see hundreds of thousands of United Airlines frequent flier (FF) miles; a pattern that suggests that I fly exclusively, including client bookings by their travel agencies on United for me; you’d see signing up for dozens of promotions; you’d see using hotel loyalty cards to get United FF miles in the place of hotel points; you’d see me flying United partners Star Alliance airlines whenever I can’t fly United. You’d also see about 50-75,000 miles per year over the past few years. I’d look like a very loyal United flyer.
[ ... snip ... ]
In any case, as late November 2008 rolled around, I received a letter in the mail from United Airlines. In effect, it said:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. Tell you what, you give us $2300.00 and we will give you the additional 14,000 miles that you need to be Premier Executive. How about that?”
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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