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United flies the friendly skies - not so, American Airlines
By Lauren | May 13, 2010
Let’s give BP and its partners in disaster a break today and talk instead about how the airlines and, in particular, American Airlines, are handling their customers these days. Last Thursday, I flew to Minneapolis to speak to the entertainment lawyers’ section of the Minnesota Bar Association. (They’re a great group, by the way.) When buying my ticket through Expedia, I found it most convenient to fly out to Minneapolis on United and home on American. Or at least it seemed convenient at the time …
My flight out on Thursday was uneventful, but major storms delayed planes across the country on Friday afternoon. The flight I was supposed to take out of Minneapolis was cancelled, and the earlier flight on which American thoughtfully rebooked me was delayed long enough that I missed my Chicago connection. That’s where the trouble started. Although my boarding passes were issued and printed by American Airlines, its representatives insisted that I had a “United Airlines” ticket and refused to rebook me. Eventually, I learned that my boarding passes had a numeric code at the bottom that started with United’s prefix, a detail that no passenger could reasonably be expected to understand. By then, it was ten o’clock at night. When I asked the ticketing agent whether she really meant to say that, despite my having been a frequent flyer with American for twenty-five years, she was refusing to help me get home, she snapped “that’s not the point!” Really? It sure seemed like the point to me.
Thankfully, United Airlines’ ticketing representative was more reasonable. He agreed that my boarding passes certainly looked like I was ticketed on American Airlines, but he cheerfully said “hey, we’ll take their money!” and booked me on a United Airlines flight to D.C. If he hadn’t done so, I might well have been stranded in Chicago with no way home.
Guess which airline has my gratitude and future business: the one whose agents helped me out, or the one whose representatives relied on an unintelligible numeric code to get snippy while stranding a passenger high and dry? We hear a lot about how the airlines are struggling to make ends meet, but playing games around ticketing is no way to maintain customer relations. If a boarding pass belongs to a particular airline, that airline should honor it, period. Paying passengers deserve that much integrity from companies who charge hundreds of dollars at a time to fly the friendly skies.
Topics: Business Ethics, business communications, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |
May 14th, 2010 at 1:00 am
[...] United flies the friendly skies – not so, American Airlines | The Business Ethics Blog [...]
June 7th, 2010 at 9:54 am
Hello and congratulations on your post. I found it via Google. Though I couldn’t read the whole of it, maybe I should blame my sloppy net connection. It got hanged each time I tried your links. Hope things work in future. Anyways, keep blogging.