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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Dear Southwest: Let’s Solve the “Fat” Problem Once and for All. Here’s How.
Dear Southwest Airlines: Your loyal customers LUV you because 1) throughout your history, you have always been an industry innovator; 2) your business model is to keep things lean and simple; and 3) you run your operations based upon a winning strategy of positive relationships.
But you messed up over the weekend with the Kevin Smith blow-up.
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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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jetBlue: Relationships + Leadership + Innovation2
Author and journalist Marc Gunther offers up some wonderful insights concerning the nature of jetBlue’s success, in a CNN article published last Thursday that was accompanied a day later by a post in Gunther’s own blog.
Gunther accompanied jetBlue CEO Dave Barger on a flight to jetBlue University in Orlando, the airline’s employee training facility, and his writing seems to confirm that jetBlue is the “new Southwest.”
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Hmmm … “Southwest Never Broke My Guitar”
OK, it’s late, a bit lame, and the production values suck, but Gory Bateson’s essential point is well taken:
(BTW, you gotta love the contents of his suitcase! Wonder how much the Grand Marnier contributed to his performance?)
