Quality Observer
 

I was recently invited to be a quality observer for my next KLM/AF flight. Somebody else got an invitation? Is this something new? Not getting much of a compensation, but hopefully they'll take more note of my pet peeve about the Crown Lounge. It's a business class flight, so I can comment about the catering there and make the suggestion to raise the standards to that of Asian airports like Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. I hope that more of you Quality Observers will do the same, so hopefully they will improve the catering. :D

No, it exists for a long time, also received many invitations.

Hmmm, either not many people mind about the Crown Lounge catering, or KLM just don't listen.

I had one 2 days ago and commented at every step on the Crown Lounge Catering. It won't come to you as a surprise that the level of satisfaction about the food offering wasn't part of the questions...

I seem to get a Q.O. about every 3rd or 4th flight these days.

Crown Lounge comments are not particularly useful to them at this moment as the renovated lounge will be opening before long and in the meantime they will not be doing anything to change the current offerings or worn-out furniture.

A bit off topic however a good question to ask: What is the baseline? If you compare the Crown Lounges to the AF lounges @ CDG, or specifically AMS lounge 52 to the CDG 2E lounges - then you have a point.
If you compare to other Skyteam lounges on international hubs or even to many *A or OW lounges I still think they are better than average.

Its a regular top up opportunity of 500 miles a survey.........

I've done the survey literally a dozen times or so. But the questions are very generic, and I much doubt that they are looking at the free-text fields to be honest.

I get the invitation to do these on 30% of my flights. Very straightforward generic questions on quality of sky priority lanes, staff performance, lounge, flight, etc.
Easy way to get a few extra miles and give some notice where it's lacking

I complete these quite regularly. I'd like to think that KLM does read the comments of Quality Observers and seeks to act on them. I always used to slate the European Short Haul Economy catering ("sweet or salty") in Quality Observer reports and that got changed. I've also noticed improvements to Sky Priority boarding at airports where I repeatedly reported problems. Probably just a co-incidence in both cases, but if KLM has an army of regular customers who are all complaining about the same things, I'd hope such comments would hold some weight. FWIW, I do make a point of commenting on the 'culinary delights' served up in the Crown Lounges...

Tokyo? Which lounge? I suppose you mean some non-SkyTeam lounge. We flew back from Tokyo last week and we were told we had two options, the Korean or the Delta lounges. We were also told the Delta lounge was better so we went there. On the plus side we found somewhere to sit down, which is the most important thing for us and not so obvious in Europe these days (in the past month we have had to leave lounges at CDG and ZRH due to lack of space). We could even plug our computers. But the catering was quite similar to AMS and definitely not as good ad CDG, at least in our opinion. It's a shame CDG doesn't ban guests during peak hours.

Btw, AF/KLM almost always want our opinion after long-loul flights and sometimes after shower intra-European flights.