Originally Posted by
sbm12
Not all of them are as anonymous as they appear. Also, the airlines - if they are doing things correctly - are targeting offers based on FF# combined with other metrics. They're also tracking complaints and such through those same mechanisms. So they should know if you've complained about a broken seat on every single flight and they might just reply telling you to find a different seat to fly in or ignore your repeated complaints completely.
But that only tracks if you complain to the airline. It doesn't track whether you complain to all your friends, coworkers, all the people in line with you at the airport, etc.
Now, if people are so silly as to do such complaining on social media pages where they use their real name, they of course can get a backlash (just as job applicants are finding out about backlashes from the same stuff). But very few people on FT can be easily traced back to their real name. So if I do all my complaining about airline X only on FT (or offline out of earhsot of the airline), how do they know? While I think the Southwest conversion to a money-based earning and redemption scheme mostly sucked, I've never complained to Southwest itself about it. And I was already only earning miles from (on the ground) partners and flying Southwest only on reward flights even before RR 2.0 came along, so I have not even changed my behavior as a result of my complaint. (It's just that I've ruled out changing my behiavor in the future, whereas if it had stayed at RR 1.5 I might have eventually started taking paid Southwest flights again.)
I think, amusingly enough, I'm in the bottom right corner simply because I find it "too much trouble" to complain to airlines most of the time. For example, at AA (where I'm elite), I find that I usually get compensated for IRROPS with extra RDMs simply by waiting a week or so! So why bother contacting them?
When Southwest "melted down" at the RR 2.0 transition, wait times on their CS calls were documented to be horribly long, so what was the point in calling to complain? Same now with the UA/CO merger, what's the point of calling to complain about some missing Marriott bonus postings, everyone who credited Marriott to UA during MegaMiles has had the same problem since 3/4, and I presume once it's finally (whenever) resolved for one person, it'll probably be resolved for everyone, so agian I just wait instead of complaining (except for complaining anonymously on FT!
).
So it's not that I don't have complaints, and it's not that my lack of complaints mean that I'd recommend every airline. It's just that it's in my nature to let other people be the nail that sticks out and the energy-consuming whine, and I tend to sit back and wait most of the time. I have about the same lack of complaints directed toward the ailrines I like least as toward the airlines I fly the most!
So perhaps this all boils down to the fact that airlines should reward quiet, mild-mannered people in general?
