Originally Posted by
halls120
When I didn't renew my Admirals Club membership after 10 straight years, AA asked me why.
Some people do care about their customers.
I was a multi-year PLT on TWA in the late 90s. Buying F or full fare Y, spending like $50-70K/year. When the AA merger happened, upgrades went away and they made no effort to address the loss of benefits, basically told me that I could earn upgrades and they would send me 4 certs for every 10K I flew. That and a bad experience at ORD, and I walked, to CO...
I never heard boo from them. Then about 7-8 years later, I was on a CX flight to HGK and my seat mate turned out to be a AA VP, and I told him the story. He apologized, said that it was acknowledged w/i the executive team that they had bungled the TWA acquisition, and had lost many of the most valuable thing that TWA had - which were its "very frequent fliers". He said that they had used it as a valuable, if expensive, lesson and now were tracking FFers much more closely. He gave me his card, said to e-mail him if I was interested in coming back to American.
Originally Posted by
golfingboy
I did get a communication in the form of a survey asking about my travel patterns this year and why the shift in my travels with UA compared to last year.
I have only flown 14K PQMs YTD with UA and I have nothing booked with them.
I believe some others got this survey as well.
I would love for someone to post the text of these surveys. Several years ago (when I was GS, and flying only UAL) I got a similar survey, but from a third party, but given where it was sent, I know it was from UAL. It asked me who I flew, what programs I kept miles in, my future travel plans, and my happiness with each program and airline. I am curious if its the same type of information, or something more targeted to quitters.
Originally Posted by
1KPath
UA (pre-merger) used to contact me regularly...either personally or via our organization's sales rep. When our organization left UA a couple of years ago, we received a flurry of communications from UA corporate...including a number of visits from corporate VPs trying to entice us back, ususally spouting the "excellent route system and 787" script ...since then, all we hear are crickets! AA, on the other hand, gives me a call almost monthly to see how our experience has been...when there have been issues (not many!), they have been addressed immediately...usually with multiple reponses from escalating levels at AA...sometimes almost too much attention
...and when we don't fly much with AA for a period, we are usually contacted to see if everything is all right. Last year, I broke an ankle and did not fly for a couple of months...AA contacted me to see if everything was OK...when I told them I had broken my ankle, they sent me a get well card and a couple of upgrades to make the return to flying more comfortable.
Some may say that it is all superficial...but AA seems to be making an attempt (at least for the time being!)
I have the same thing re AA multiple times.
Originally Posted by
CMK10
My Dad made EXP by segments on AA in 2006 and 2007. In 2008 he retired and stopped flying much. It only took them until February for someone to call him and ask if something had happened that caused him to fly less and if there was anything they could do to fix it.
ditto. I might also add I got a similar reach out by AS when I stopped flying them (when I went back to UAL, from CO, in 2006-7).
Originally Posted by
CO_Nonrev_elite
Much easier to keep an existing customer than to keep trying to find new ones. It's business 101. While I do not believe that UA doesn't care, I think their operation is entirely chaotic and they are just not organized, managed, and happy enough to get around to showing they care yet.
I also think that top management honestly believed (until recently) that any defections were temporary and that folks would come back as they had to, and as such never devoted the resources necessary to try to get back "unmanaged" FFers. If you go back two years ago to the summer of 2012, and comments on calls and at conferences, it was very clear that Jeff and John had no plan other than using the corporate sales staff to reach out to "managed" travelers and extol the "unparallelled network" and the "787" and how they ought to be flying United.
