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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Travelers-say-airlines-apf-1323824965.html?x=0&.v=3
“Travelers are lashing out at airlines for poor customer service after this week’s storm on the East Coast left thousands stranded and unable to get through to reservation agents.
Travelers are incensed over what they say is the airlines’ effort to blame everything on the weather and take themselves off the hook.
“We don’t blame the airlines or airports for bad weather, but it’s their responsibility to be prepared,” said Brandon Macsata of the Association for Airline Passenger Rights. “The airlines just seem to be saying, `Suck it up.’ People are tired of sucking it up.”"
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For example, Continental cut 600 call-center jobs — nearly one-fourth of its 2,600 reservations workers — in February. A few months before that, it closed a center in Florida and cut 500 jobs. American Airlines cut about 500 when it closed a center in Connecticut.
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The airlines cut staff because so many people now book tickets online. The airlines themselves encouraged the trend by charging customers a fee to book over the phone.
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Some travelers had better luck calling travel agents back home instead of dealing with airline agents standing a few feet away
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As the airlines cut call center jobs in recent years, they also eliminated flights and grounded planes to meet the reduced demand for travel during the recession. Those leaner schedules helped the airlines earn handsome profits this summer but left them with less capacity to handle the backlog of passengers stranded in New York and Philadelphia by this week’s storm
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U.S. airlines operating domestic flights can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger for tarmac delays longer than three hours, but the rule doesn’t apply to international flights or foreign airlines. Passenger-rights groups are lobbying the U.S. Transportation Department to extend the penalties to all flights to and from the U.S., but the proposal is opposed by the International Air Transport Association, which represents foreign airlines.
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In 2010: Plenty of Turbulence for Fliers
“The year 2010 was supposed to be a time of recovery for airlines and their passengers. Instead, it will be remembered for its disruptions. Blizzards, ash from an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland and even fiery failures of new engines left millions of passengers stranded throughout the year. As the recent blizzard on the East Coast—with 7,000 canceled flights—showed, our air-travel system can be exceedingly unreliable in an age when technology makes so much of our daily routine dependable.”
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Now brace yourselves for 2011: Fliers can expect higher fares with higher oil prices, possible labor disruptions, continued security hassles and perhaps even tighter airline capacity.
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Those who do fly also paid more in 2010. The price passengers pay to fly one mile domestically has increased an average of about 10% this year, according to monthly data compiled by the Air Transport Association through October.
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But consider where the profits are coming from: Over that same period, airlines took in $2.6 billion in baggage fees and $1.7 billion in cancellation penalties and change fees—with those two fees alone totaling two-thirds of operating profits.
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The long-delayed Boeing 787 (now dubbed by some the 7-Late-7) “Dreamliner” had a series of setbacks, including an electrical fire aboard a test plane. Already three years late, the 200-passenger plane that promises greater cabin comfort will likely be delivered to its first customer, Japan’s All Nippon Airlines, sometime in 2011.
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The Airbus A380 came under scrutiny when a Rolls Royce engine on a Qantas Airways A380 had a fiery failure in November. Qantas grounded six A380s for more than three weeks.
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And the number of multi-hour waits on uncomfortable airplanes was dramatically lower because of a federal rule enacted in late April that called for heavy fines if airlines keep people aboard planes on the ground for more than three hours without the chance to go back to a terminal.
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Consolidation among U.S. airlines advanced in 2010. The merger of United and Continental airlines closed, though the integration of the two carriers is still ahead for travelers. Southwest Airlines agreed to buy AirTran Airways, expanding the reach of the nation’s largest domestic airline into international flying and adding a second type of aircraft to its fleet. And American Airlines finally won approval for a joint venture with British Airways. More consolidation among airlines is likely.
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Delta shows how to use Twitter in a crisis
“The Christmas time meltdown of the air transport system in the East Coast of the US was driven by the coldest weather in over 60 years.
It caps a series of unique weather/Act of God events that have plagued air travel in 2010.
While both the airlines and the airports have been roundly denounced as being instruments of the devil as far as media and customer advocacy groups are concerned, there is a silver lining in that the airlines have found better and more appropriate ways to interact with their customers in real time.
To this end, Twitter seems to have been a solid case of how this can work.”
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With the airlines having cut back on customer service personnel, this meltdown should have been a customer service nightmare of biblical proportions, but we have seen that both the airports and the airlines have improved how they communicate.
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Similarly one of the worst affected airports was London Heathrow, but its tweeting did much to keep the public informed. LHR did more than a credible job of using Twitter to get the message out.
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I used to believe that Twitter would not scale for large problems, but it can and really does work in these types of situation.
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Stranded Travelers Find Relief in Twitter
“Some travelers stranded by the great snowstorm of 2010 discovered a new lifeline for help. When all else fails, Twitter might be the best way to book a seat home. “
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Since Monday, nine Delta Air Lines agents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.
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Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.
She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.
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“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”
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Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.
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Sometimes, just connecting with someone at an airline can calm angry passengers.
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He also said that stranded families were using their gadgets in a team approach to getting answers.
“Mom would be on Twitter, Dad on Facebook, Junior would be searching sites and whoever hit pay dirt first is the way the family would figure out what to do next,” he said
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Brian Devinney, who used to work in the travel industry, is stuck in Jacksonville, Fla., until his flight leaves for New York on Sunday. So on Tuesday night he spent three hours offering information to stranded travelers who were using the airline Twitter accounts.
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“With Twitter, you have people who were reaching out looking for something, for a community of people stuck in the same situation,” Mr. Devinney said.
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But that does not always help. Susan Moffat of Oakland, Calif., spent 48 hours trying to get through to JetBlue this week. She wanted to get back home from a visit to New York. She finally connected and, after holding for an hour, secured a flight back on New Year’s Day. The agent told her she might have gotten a quicker response if she had used Facebook or Twitter.
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Travel industry embraces online marketing through social media
“The “Travel Blog Project” is being labelled as a “collaborative online marketing effort”, allowing travel agents to experience the effectiveness of online marketing methods through active content marketing. Each day, the agents participating in the project will be sent an online newsletter, giving them a theme or the day. The agents will then have to compose around five lines of text surrounding the theme, and post it to their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and their travel blogs.”
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This will allow them to devise and share best practice methods, ultimately improving the success of the entire travel industry.
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“The key to building a thriving travel practice is communicating the unique value you [the travel agent] provide on a consistent basis to as many people as you can by methodically increasing your online footprint.”
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“To get to this point, Boeing and Air France worked intensively for two years. That’s how long it takes to determine the layout of this massive aircraft, which can carry 383 passengers and 23 tons of freight more than 14,000 kilometers. A long, painstaking work is also a race against time, all the way until the plane is ready for service. “The countdown started in 2008,” says Nicolas Bertrand, who is in charge of Air France’s long-haul fleet. “The first stage is to determine in detail what the plane will look like, from the seats to the positioning of the tags or the screws for cribs.” “
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“It’s not only about mechanical equipment choices ; the number of seats and layout choices will depend on markets and routes on which the planes will fly.” In this case, this step was all the more complex because this B777 is the first to receive a new tri-class layout, without a first class but with a business class and a premium economy.
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Once they’re selected, parts purchases must be negotiated by Air France’s acquisitions services. That’s another three months
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Every step of the way, Air France Industries engineers travel from Paris to inspect and oversee operations. “We use that time to inspect certain parts of the plane which will later be inaccessible, making sure that the metal sheets are correctly secured, that there are no overseen FODs (foreign object debris),
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A week prior to the scheduled delivery date, the complex process of the plane’s “technical acceptance” begins. A team of ten people flies from Paris to check everything that can be checked on the aircraft. Called the customer walk-through, it lasts three days
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All the flaws noticed on the ground or in flight are listed in a “letter of reservation,” explaining how Boeing should resolve the problem.
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D-Day has finally arrived : the plane is being delivered. Boeing will sign the Bill of Sale and Air France, the Aircraft Receipt.
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Only after making sure that everything is in order does Thomas Sonigo pick up his phone to call Air France’s bank in New York and transfer the funds into Boeing’s account. The price tag is kept secret, some discounts negotiated two years before can sometimes be considerable
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So it’s not until Boeing gets confirmation of the payment from its own bank that it will give its client the Bill of sale in exchange for the Aircraft receipt. Only then is Air France officially the owner of its 61st B777 and its 200th Boeing.
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The story could end there but in the case of the F-GZNH, there’s a quite unusual, though increasingly frequent, epilogue. In a few weeks it will actually be sold to Air Lease Corporation, a new American airplane sales and rentals company, created by Steve Udvar-Hazy, the former CEO of the industry’s world leader ILFC.
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Who needs Anti-Social Travel in a Social Currency economy?
“I recently returned from a trip from Seattle to Nashville. I am involved in launching a new airline applying The Social Value Game to a legacy industry. The objective of this venture is to match a fleet of 15,000 private jets to social media networks for efficient door-to-door travel. The start-up is largely founded on the premise that a dismal travel experience is a dismal social experience.”
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The opportunity of the next economic paradigm is the ability to articulate the social value on all of these things – the ability to predict into the future the True Value of all the things that are squandered by an anti-social experience
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With a private airplane, I could leave my home at 11:00 for a 11:30 departure at a small local airfield 6 miles from my house. The flight would have been about 4 hours long and I would arrive at my destination for dinner reservations with my colleagues. The flight would cost less than 1400 dollars round trip and I could return a full day earlier (eliminating 2 nights) than the the commercial flight for the same set of meeting objectives.
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So if 10 hours of your life is less than 200 dollars, then fly commercial. If your time, family, community – your life – is worth more than 20 dollars per hour, then you should consider taking America’s newest airline.
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Le Self Travel pourrait rapidement concerner le monde du voyage d’affaires
“Considéré comme une évolution normale dans le monde du tourisme, le Self Travel pourrait également s’imposer dans les voyages d’affaires. Pour mémoire, il s’agit de l’ensemble des déplacements préparés seul ou à l’aide de sites Internet spécialisés et qui, au final, sont censés coûter bien moins cher qu’en passant par une agence dédiée. Aux États-Unis, selon une étude publiée par Gallup, le self Travel représenterait aujourd’hui un peu moins de 8 %. Les prévisions font état d’un marché autour de 34 % d’ici à la fin de 2015. Si l’univers du loisir est principalement concerné par cette nouvelle méthode d’achat, Gallup prévoit qu’aux USA, 2 à 6 % du marché du voyage d’affaires pourrait être concerné. “
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Que va donc apporter le self Travel ? Sans doute une meilleure adaptation au Best Buy très prisé par les petites structures économiques.
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A l’évidence, cette maturité “achats” pourrait rapidement faciliter le développement du self Travel et engendrer de nouvelles habitudes de consommation proches de celle que demandent déjà les voyageurs d’affaires.
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Links for this week (weekly)
– January 2, 2011Posted in: Read elsewhere...
