gawhite411

The FA obviously should have hit the Free button for the whole plane.

Steve GadFly

I think that button is on the flight deck and the captain has to make the decision. Not 100% sure but I remember reading something like that a while back.

gawhite411

Well the FA should have brought it to his attention. No captain would want F passengers to be paying because of technical snafus. FA was obviously too lazy to call him up and ask.

bocastephen

It's not really Continental's system to give away. It's owned and operated by DirecTV - they made the investment and shoulder the operating costs in exchange for a large slice of that $6. I'm not so sure CO crews can just hand out free TV willy-nilly.

SEA1K4EVR

Or perhaps they can but DTV will know about it and charge CO for the privilege on a per use basis... that could be why it may be something left up to captain's discretion only.

gawhite411

If the button is there, they are allowed to us it. Otherwise the button would not exist and CO would have NO way to comp.

princessyoga

This is what happened to me on my 3rd Dec flight. I used my card on 2 of the units as soon as we boarded. One for myself and one for my little girl. They kept making the announcement even after they knew the system was broken. I have been fighting to get my money back ever since. It know it is only $12 but it is the principle. I have heard that they have finally found the charges and will refund me in the next 7-10 days. This is after several emails back and forth.

N965VJ

Whole lotta there, not the least of which is disputing the charge with the CC company.

tcook052

My thoughts exactly, though since I was alone it would've only been $6.

channa

This isn't willy nilly. It's otherwise not working as designed for a significant portion of customers. Not only that, these may arguably be some of the most frequent or most valuable customers on the plane.

And if there's a dispute about who pays, the right thing to do would be for CO to push the button, COmp it, and go back to DTV later and say your tech didn't fix it, and this is what we had to do, and ask for a credit for what CO has negotiated to pay them.

Whether it would be worth it for them to do that is up to CO, but to put the premium customers in the middle of it and tell them to deal with their abysmal customer care department? That's ridiculous.


This is the second report in this thread of this type of "just do it because you're told" behavior. I always find it funny that some of the good CO staff who post here and are able to adapt, react, or otherwise think outside of the box in different situations have a hard time believing that some CO-workers simply do as they're told without any regard for COmmon sense.

It's a real shame that the customers are further inconvenienced with having to track down charges, and CO resources are also wasted having to deal with petty refunds as a result of this type of behavior.

Lafayetteflyer

That was the Black eyed peas shouting (horsely out of tune) a 13 minute medley of their one hit with hundreds of extras rejected from a Tron movie set jumping around like the battery packs were lighting them up instead of the leds sewn in their costumes.

EWR764

I assume I'm one of the usual suspects (), although I wholeheartedly agree that CO under Larry onward has completely and utterly obliterated any semblance of employee empowerment that was encouraged under Gordon. I think the company would sooner implement a fleet of automatons in place of their CSRs than promulgate more flexible, customer-friendly policies that rely on an employee's common sense.

With that said, how can you dismiss any accountability LiveTV has in the design of the system? They paid for it, after all.

channa

I have a hard time believing that a newer system would have fewer options unless the user requested fewer options (or failed to request more options). F9's system lets the FA control from a control panel who gets it for free. CO has no such control panel.

If CO wanted a COntrol panel that allowed a FA to punch in a seat number to manually reset a seat, or comp a seat, they could have required it in the spec. Or if CO wanted to allow employees the ability to comp it on a seat-by-seat basis, a gift-card type solution that was proposed upthread could have been required in the spec.

Heck, CO even gave employees cards at the roll-out to use for free while they non-rev. It can be done with the existing infrastructure if they gave cards to the FAs. Either CO doesn't want to, or CO can't fathom the idea that they could screw up to the point of having to comp TV on an individual seat basis.

DeaconFlyer

Or it could have been a requirement from LiveTV. When they are collecting the majority of the revenue, they would rather that a FA couldn't give out free products easily. Contract specs can go both way.

entropy

Who said anything about free? Clearly the "FREE" button costs CO a pretty penny.

But you're absolutely right about the contract bit. CO COULD have contracted to get $3/seat "comps" that they could activate in individual screens. CO did have cards to give CO-workers free DTV for a while, so the technical capacity is certainly there.