Originally Posted by
Often1
1. Posting a rant on FT and $3 gets you a coffee at a major chain barista.
So are you saying that any time a customer on FT expresses his/her displeasure with a very basic customer service failing it is a rant?
2. Constructive suggestions such as "check your itineraries" or hang up and dial back, are helpful. Whether they ought to be necessary in a perfect world is besides the point.
Checking your itinerary is a work-around, but it doesn't change the fact that the airline has a basic responsibility to keep customers informed of basic changes.
3. Roughly the same criticisms are leveled at AA (which had a 44% delay/cancellation rate last month) and DL. UA knows that. There's basically no competition. And what competition there is will be all the more less after AA is acquired.
The issue here is not IrrOps, it's whether airlines are keeping customers informed.
No one like IrrOps/itinerary changes, but they are even less pleasant when customers are kept in the dark.
At least in my experience flying AA and DL recently, I have been very pro-actively informed of changes, which has not been the case on UA.
Regarding AA's possible acquisition by US and your implication that customer service would suffer terribly, in the winter of 2010-11 (through a number of major weather events), I flew US LGA-PQI sometimes twice a week for 4 months.
Needless to say, there were many IrrOps. And it wasn't just me, but I ended up flying over 100 people to PQI (my crew for a TV production).
In every single case where there was an IrrOps we were not only very pro-actively contacted, but also reaccommodated very professionally and generously.
During those same weather events, the CO "800" non-elite line (I was not an elite with CO) would simply hang up and not answer for days on end.
And, just to be clear, I was also a non-elite on US, and while I was able to reach their 800 non-elite lines in a reasonable time frame, but for the most part they called me.
Originally Posted by
DeaconFlyer
No one was berated or chastised or blamed.
They were told a solution. And because of the current failures of the UA system, what would happen if they didn't follow that solution.
If half the time that some posters currently spend criticizing others for trying to help were devoted to "affecting change" (whatever that means), maybe this system would be closer to fixed. Or maybe not. FT complaints clearly don't rank too high on the UA priority list these days.
The tone comes off as berating or chastising when posts include language to the effect of "don't be surprised if you have a problem if you don't constantly check your itineraries," implying it's the customer's responsibility to make up for the company's failings.
These posts also come off as implicit apologism for the airline because they fail to clearly state the airline's basic responsibility in the matter, which--of course--is to pro-actively communicate any changes to the customers.