roberino

OK, I get that attracting Y customers is not top priority. That's clear, but why would any business be OK with tens of thousands of pounds of revenue per year PER CUSTOMER just getting up and walking out of the door? I can see from comments above that I'm not the only one.

I'm not talking about winning new business here. I am talking about the airlines trying to understand why they have lost business as that's a powerful thing to know. We have long meetings every month at my company poring over why we lost individual accounts, not to win the business back but to make sure we don't lose business in the same way as before. We call the customers and get them to tell us why we lost and then factor that into sales strategies and product development programs.

nrr

Generating emails is not a difficult operation (based on all the spam I get each day). From merchants where I do on line buying, if I haven't bought something in a while, I get "we want you back" emails.
Wouldn't it be in an airlines interest to send pax who haven't flown their "regular" patterns a "we miss you" email?

wolf72

Sadly, economy flying passengers are not important to an airline. They can fill those seats generally without problems and you're 'investment' in the airline is minimal vs those who fly business or first on a regular basis who are their 'preferred' customers.

That's life sadly. I am waiting for the day MH decide I am not worth the gold card I carry because I fly economy.

LETTERBOY

There probably aren't enough of you to justify the expense of keeping you. If there were, BA would presumably make more of an effort.

roberino

But I'm not talking about winning me back as a customer. I'm asking why they don't even want to know why I left. A generic email shot can't do that.

Ditto my previous comment. There is no expense of keeping me because I have no intention of being kept. Do they not want to know why?

LETTERBOY

If you have no intention of being kept, why would they spend any time wondering why you left? And why would you care if they did or not? As I (and others) have said, there apparently aren't enough of you to justify the time, expense, and effort of keeping you, because there aren't enough of you to matter one way or the other to their bottom line. Why would they waste time worrying about something that's not going to impact that bottom line?

6P&E

Exactly. Recently I flew AA in F from BNA to PEK. I had no status with AA. But when a few things went wrong on the outbound and return, AA bent over backwards to help me, not because of my loyalty, but because I was booked in F. I got the perks offered due to my paid status on that one trip. I haven't forgotten, however.

HMPS

What happened to the old logic that people to switch to a better model, in this case Y to J ?

Today's regular Y pax is a good prospect to entice into J.

writerguyfl

Perhaps the airline already knows why you left. A properly conducted poll can provide statistically significant results about a large population based on a small sample size. For example, polling 1,000 people can accurately predict the opinions of hundreds of millions of people.

Granted, you may have an unusual reason why you no longer fly a certain airline. But, companies serving massive populations rarely worry about outliers.

It's possible that your airline has conducted a poll of people like you regarding the reasons why you no longer fly on that carrier. Maybe they know that X percent left because of reason A, Y percent left for reason B, and Z percent left for reason C. If they aren't planning on changing A, B, or C, there's no reason to spend time and money finding out exactly why you left.

shawbridge

A ways back, I was flying J from Boston to London on AA. At some points, I had no clients in London and my mileage on AA had dropped. I did get a call asking me if there was a reason I wasn't flying AA. I thought it was surprising that they called.

cbn42

One problem with your position is that you are assuming that airlines could win customers back by contacting them. Most people are not loyal to any airline and book whateve is cheapest, or they are locked into one airline due to a corporate contract or frequent flier program. If someone has decided to "leave" an airline for whatever reason, it's highly unlikely that an e-mail or phone call is going to bring them back. Writing an algorithm to track people's flying patterns, identify those who may have switched to another carrier, and contacting them, is likely not worth the cost.

1. As another commenter said, they can already do that through random surveys. There is no need to contact every single person.

2. These days, there isn't much that distinguishes airlines from each other. Sure, a very few people might switch from A to B because they didn't like the food, but more than likely about the same number switched from B to A for the same reason. Given that almost everyone books on schedule and price, there is really no point watching these things and trying to track the minute differences between airlines. It's more worthwhile to invest on price and schedule.

RadioGirl

There's always some degree of "churn" in any competitive industry, and as long as the number of departing customers is about the same as the number of new customers, it's probably not worth the effort to find out why. OTOH if the airline is suddenly losing large numbers of loyal customers but not attracting new customers, it would point to a more significant issue and I assume they would want to figure out what had caused the change.

I let my paid Qantas Club membership lapse last year, after more than 20 years, and half-expected that someone might contact me to find out why. In my wilder fantasies I even imagined them offering me a discounted price to come back. But all I got was a few emails extolling the glories of the QC which appeared to be aimed at "QFF but not QC member".

Daniel-SYD

I am surprised too that their customer retention units don't try for a more direct approach like emailing or picking up the phone.

It really doesn't matter who you are. In my case I was a UA GS for the last few years (1K now). This year I've flown 0 miles with them, initially because of the loss of GS, but now because they make no effort to find out why - so it has become a game to see how long I can hold off, and it is giving me the opportunity to try other airlines.

I'm also far from retirement and from this year have a much bigger travel budget.

Status is addictive because it is useful. But so is feeling free to shop around - which I encourage you to do a little too.

lhrsfo

I have much sympathy with the OP's views and I, too, cannot understand why there's not some automated email follow up to customers who are changing their flying patterns.

Having said that, it has now become clear that loyalty programmes have little to do with loyalty. They are effectively a rebate on ticket purchases, increasing with the amount of purchases. Why do I stay loyal? I receive lounge access (for which I could pay), a greater baggage allowance (for which I could pay), slightly better seats (for which I could pay), occasional upgrades (for which I could pay) and some free tickets (for which I could pay). So it's not loyalty, it's a simple financial transaction.

For my part, the game is to maximise my benefits. For the airlines part, they are working hard to minimise them. The maths is simple - I'm loyal so far as the benefits exceed their cost to me.

roberino

To see if they could prevent other customers leaving in the future for similar reasons.

I don't. I'm just bemused as to why they don't care.

Because it could be an easy or cheap thing to fix. You're assuming that customer retention is ALWAYS an expensive exercise. What if a bunch of FF's left because of something that can be fixed for virtually zero cost? Wouldn't you want to know?