taxicabnumber

And therein lies the main issue with this -- if you (as a company) want legitimate feedback and/or advice, you have to pay for it. This is AA's cheapness at work: it seems to be the result of someone at AA realizing "we need feedback" and focusing purely on the cost of obtaining data rather than the value of the data collected.

james318

That is what I was thinking. Allow elites to opt-in during flight booking. They get notified before there flight if they will be one of them. Tie an incentive, like 1000 miles or something dumb,

3Cforme

What would send FAs into a bigger tizzy than being evaluated by management? Being evaluated by anonymous flyers. 'They don't know our service standards.' 'Catering didn't stock it.' 'We were late boarding and didn't have time for PDBs.' The list of excuses would be endless.

MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

AA could cpnduct Focus Groups and I believe at least LAA did indeed. Whether they collected any valuable feedback (doesn't become a gripe session for trivial matters) or did anything with what they collected is another matter.

IADCAflyer

bobnchi

True, but those issues not our (the travelers) problem. The value would come by evaluating how the FA's handle adversity.

jAAck

Exactly. I have *never* understood the US legacy approach of not having a senior FA on board who is responsible for managing the crew and service. Non-legacy airlines do it. US FAs and the unions are vehemently against this, but in what other industry does an employee have literally no exposure to supervision? Even other industries with union labor have worker / crew supervisory positions.

PTahCha

United had a similar program in place a few years back, using both management personnel as well as flight attendant trainers. I actually flew on a flight with one of these trainers, where she was checking in with the crew on a regularly basis to provide feedback on service delivery consistency. In chatting with the crew being evaluated, they felt her comments were trivial (e.g., placement of coffee pot on the dessert cart on the top shelf instead of middle).

Also, UA uses an external vendor for secret shopper service, at least according to this vendor's promotional material.

Dallas49er

To AA "manglement", who is JUST NOW coming out of the fog? In a police environment, AA manglement is doing the equivilent of letting the drug dealers know who the narcs are. Brilliant.

OR:

To the flight attendants union, as just one more example of management's callous disregard of their right to be lazy.

UA, in the '80s, had secret shoppers, also known as "ghost riders". One bad review and the FA was suspended for a month AND sent to retraining. 2nd bad review required a career change. The FA's HATED ghost riders, and it was always a topic of conversation in the galleys ("I think 2B is a ghost rider!") as they then performed a flawless service.

LovePrunes

that's probably how they concluded they had a problem...i.e. the secret part has been done and they're rolling out something to train/retrain

using the excuse that it's the junior people who didn't learn everything in training certainly is less threatening of a message to FA's then saying we're here to correct the oldsters, which is probably where the real problem is!

all they'd get is a bunch of forms with complaints demanding miles for compensation like we get on here LOL

anc305

As I have said on this site before , the FA's and their union reflect poorly on all unions. FA's believe they are " professionals " and want to be treated as such but some act like children. Most are fair at their job , but it ain't rocket science ! " Please don't ask me to do anything while I'm in the middle of Candy Crush " . Only way to lite a fire under the lazy butts , is to terminate a few. Might sound harsh but having been in unions , it needs to be done from time to time.

lobo411

You'd be surprised. As a college professor, I'm very aware of the way that student evaluations work. The quality of the instruction provided is just about the LEAST important factor in student evals of professors. The most important factors?

Is the professor liked/likeable?

Is the professor regarded as an easy grader?

Is the professor, if male, authoritative? If female, is she attractive enough to be seen as hot by the male students but not so attractive as to be threatening to the female students?

Regardless of the above, deduct 20% to the class evals if the prof is female.

etc...

This phenomenon has been borne out by multiple studies. I have absolutely no doubt that pax rating FAs (even semi-pro "secret shoppers") would default to the same metrics. It's basic human nature to rate people based on nonsense. In other words, humans are horrible people.

MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

None of what FAs do with respect to the onboard service is mind bending. Really? How hard is to know things like if the Y seat number is tagged in blue paxs may have free alcoholic drinks. Or those on the manifest flying in Y listed as EXP/CK get free BOB. "Retraining" probably means the FA get to fly to a class in DFW and socialize with their friends while being told something they should know like the back of their hand to begin with.

BWISkyGuy

I think you hit the nail on the head. Unless we're collectively giving them different data than we're (often) griping about here, AA knows some of the senior FA's are following service standards less than some of their more junior coworkers from the metrics of the survey data and their third-party shoppers. It's more palatable to say you're trying to help reinforce the recent training of the newer employees than it is to tell the media you have a bunch of senior crew that are slacking... But if the issue was just the newer employees, they'd have adjusted the training program already. Clearly they see a broader opportunity here.

This part isn't directed at your post, but the others about the surveys. AA already has a vendor that surveys a small number of passengers from most if not all flights, on a rotating basis via email. It's a lot more insightful than it was in the old days, because now you can strategically survey across personas to get broader feedback, AND match that feedback up with what you understand those personas to expect and understand. I get surveyed on about 10% of my flights, and I'm a lowly Platinum -- I can only imagine how much survey data AA is analyzing overall.

C17PSGR

Definitely not a problem with junior crews. The best service is almost always Compass crews on the E175 and they hardly have more than a couple of years. Service is consistently good on short routes with junior crews.

As for the surveys, I have 140 segments this year on AA and 16 on DL. I've received at least five surveys from DL, a couple from AS, and none from AA.

I get the ratemyprofessor problem, although likeability is certainly more important in the FA world. That being said, DL has some very objective questions and IIRC the last AA survey also had objective questions. Were you greeted by name, were you offered a PDB, were you thanked for flying for flying AA/AS/DL? If an EXP in coach, were you offered a drink/food item.

I don't have a problem generally with AA crews. Domestic crews are almost always seem to meet service standards. For example, I'm in Y on a Project Oasis 738 with a DFW based crew.

I'd guess the crew has medium seniority (5 to 20 years). I wasn't greeted by name or offered a food/drink item, but as soon as I asked they gave the provided them. The crew is very friendly and engaged, and very service oriented.

And ... they don't like the Oasis version But that's another thread.