There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about incivility in airports and commercial airlines.
“Abnormal, aberrant or abusive behavior in the context of the air-travel experience” is back with a vengeance, says Andrew Thomas, an assistant professor of business at the University of Akron, who has written books about air rage and aviation “insecurity” and maintains a Web site called airrage.org.
Mr. Thomas sees an entitlement mind-set in today’s flying public, especially among business travelers. “Nobody tells a lot of these guys ‘no,’ ” he says. “So when a flight attendant tells them to turn off the phone or the BlackBerry or that they can’t have another drink, they don’t know how to hear ‘no,’ ” he says.
That might be part of the problem, but I have my doubts that it’s the predominant one. I think a lot of people who end up being rude to flight attendants or other airline personnel are just regular people who have had the airline stick it to them just one too many times.
When things go wrong in other customer service experiences, most people don’t fly off the handle. Mistakes happen and nothing works perfectly, and if the service you are dealing with makes a sincere apology and does what they can to make it right, all is well. My Panasonic camera broke down a few months ago, and Panasonic made it so painless and easy to get a warranty repair that I’m still a happy customer. The wait staff at restaurants will occasionally forget your order, and when they apologize and make it right, no harm done.
The problem with the airlines is that they are set up to create a bad service. The various airlines set up all of their flights at the peak times, knowing full well that there isn’t enough runway space and there’s no way all of those flights are going to take off on time. This week, outgoing FAA Administrator Marion Blakey called on the airlines to fix their scheduling problems or risk government intervention. The airlines schedule flights knowing that the only way they can work is for everything to run perfectly, and no matter how efficient the airline is, there’s no way that can happen — airplanes can’t fly through thunderstorms and they can’t land on runways occupied by other aircraft. When they don’t build enough flexibility into aircraft and crew scheduling, it’s almost guaranteed that the entire day’s schedule is going to go to hell at the first sign of trouble (and, because of crew rest regulations, probably the subsequent days’ schedules as well).
Most of the other bad experiences of the airport can be dealt with by simply being completely prepared for them; don’t check any luggage, make sure your carry-on items follow all of the idiotic TSA guidelines about 3 ounces of toothpaste, take off your shoes before someone has to ask, and have your photo ID ready at each checkpoint. But even if you do everything right, you can’t do anything about the dumb setup of check-in points (why is it unclear which line I have to stand in, ever? Can’t US Airways afford to make a few signs?), and you can’t do anything when the airline sets up the schedule in a way that virtually ensures that last night’s crew will get in too late to fly this morning’s flight. It’s like the airlines aren’t even trying. When airline personnel apologize, their apologies sound shallow and rehearsed because they are — they make the exact same apology a million times a day, every day. “Sorry” doesn’t mean anything when we know full well that you’re not sorry at all — this is happening because it’s how the system is designed.
I’m all for capitalism, and I want the airlines to make lots of money. But when the only way you can break even is by keeping all the schedules so tight that you’re forced to run a bad operation in which all of your customers are treated poorly, then there’s something wrong with the whole concept. I’m against increased government regulation, but you’re just asking for it. The elected representatives can’t ignore an entire nation of unhappy fliers forever.
