Just how bad is it out there? I publish a lot a lot of stories from disgruntled passengers, hotel guests and motorists on this blog. But what about the experiences of the people who are often providing the services that they’re complaining about?
I get a fair amount of angry e-mails from airline employees, but most of them don’t cover any new ground. They criticize passengers and lash out at me for giving them a voice. For them, the “comments” section of this site is always open.
But yesterday I received an illuminating e-mail from a former US Airways gate agent named Helen Clifford that suggests airline employees are suffering as much as passengers.
There is no formal training for the first three months and you are kind of on your own.
You had to purchase your own uniforms and could not get any time off for the first six months because you were on probation.
The pay ($8.72/hr) and the hours (5 a.m. to 11:30 a.m . or 12 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.) including weekends amazed me. Since these jobs are unionized, there was no room for any negotiations.
The first week I was there a US Airways pilot pulled me aside and said I should work for Southwest Airlines. He said they treat their employees much better.
The seasoned employees were so jaded that they couldn’t wait to retire. They did not treat the passengers nicely.
I am college-educated (Bachelors degree) and thought the benefits of free flights would help my family out with visiting our daughter in college. With the oversold flights and the standby guidelines, you could never plan on getting on a flight.
When I resigned I was not even asked why.
No wonder the airline business cannot retain decent employees. Plus, the way ticket agents are treated by many passengers, it is just not worth it. I think the airline business is in a deep spiral.
Just as a reality check, I ran this reader mail past a US Airways insider. That person verified key parts of this letter, but also noted that other legacy airlines face similar morale problems and are unable to retain new employees.
So what does this mean to you?
Next time you’re at the ticket counter, be nice. You might be working with a veteran ticket agent who will be crabby and know that they can’t be fired. You don’t want to incur that person’s wrath. Or second, you could end up with someone like Helen. New to the job, working bad hours and feeling no love from her colleges.
Either way, your smile and politeness will go a long way to making everyone’s day a little better.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
There’s an old adage “treat people as you’d expect to be treated yourself”…
Something to remember when you step up to a ticket/ check in counter after the customer from hell has just left…
I would like any airline employee to explain to me why talking between themselves [at ticket counters, gates and on board during a time when they are supposedly working] is more important than helping a customer.
I was in a ‘ticket counter’ line and needed to use a voucher to buy a ticket for my son [they are usually not capable of being used to ticket online] and two employees were standing the back rank talking about their families [we were so close you could easily overhear]. I am a lifetime platinum member of their FFB program but I was not in the premium check in line, since, well, I was not checking in after all. They chatted for about 5 minutes, then one of them came up and took the person standing in the check in line next to me, despite it being very clear that I was standing there for several minutes longer.
I ‘ahemed’ and said, excuse me, but ‘I was here first.’ She looked at me and said, believe it or now, ‘too bad, I’m helping this person first.’ After she finished, she walked away and starting chatting again. Another person opened up and I walked up, presented my life platinum card and asked to speak with the station manager. Given my status, that person did come speak to me while the ticket was processed for my son. I identified the employee and recanted what had happened. He looked at me with a blank stare. I told him that I assumed he wanted to know, but must have been wrong.
The two employees were, in plain view of their boss, still just standing there chatting away while the checkin line was getting longer. He did nothing about it.
There is no respect for either customers or supervisors. No respect for service or competence. If a business shows an utter lack of respect for its’ customers, why should the customers show concern for the employees – unfortunately, this is human nature.
Most airline employees are underpaid and overabused. If the company would give the employee the ability to solve problems immediately, everyone, including the employee, would have a better day.
Instead, employees ‘can’t’ help you since we all know the real reason is ‘won’t.’ When there is an ‘irregular’ operation, they can and do rebook tickets with no problem. For friends and family, they’ll get information on delays and schedule problems. For the rest of us, we are on our own.
I LOVE – absolutely LOVE – having a blackberry in an airport when there is a delay. I can go to http://www.fly.faa.gov and PROVE to the gate agent that ‘weather’ is not causing delays, because there ARE no delays at the airport. I can also prove, being a pilot, that ATC is not causing a delay, by going to the ‘playbook’ and flow control pages of the FAA website. I can also see where the inbound aircraft is – and put paid to a claim the plane will be here ‘momentarily.’
The truth will set you free.
Ok in part I understand…yes they are overworked, under paid, under or not even trained and all that. The veterens are jaded, and keeping new people around is near impossible. Fine I get it. However, that is the case in most Customer Service related jobs in any industry. Yes, you might be overworked and stressed. I’ve written articles abotu how this very issue effects how customers are treated. I work in a similar situation, but my take is that no matter how poorly I am being paid, it isn’t my customers (or in case students’) fault! They do not determine how much I am paid or how little I’m trained. Do I wish customers treated me better at times? Sure. However, no matter how they treat me it is my job to meet their needs to the best of my ability with out undermining the policies of my employer.
I would like to address some of the problems stated in JoeF’s comment.
Weather is not always a problem in the city you are trying to leave from. You also cannot leave when the destination city is having bad weather(I think there is something about low?weather). Also, airlines do not make the decision to fly or not fly. They are told by a federal agency whether or not they can fly. I can’t remember whether it’s the FAA or the NTSB. They have a formula they use to decide on keeping planes on the ground or not. Weather is not a call the airline makes.
While I can understand getting very angry at emplpyees doing the personal chat thing(I have worked with some and have been angry enough to want to hit them in the head with a boarding pass printer) Many agents will step back from the counter to decide how to handle a situation or how to work out a ticketing problem for another passenger because of what kind of ticket it is. You will also see two agents at one computer and that usually means they are trying to figure out why the software isn’t taking information/working properly and how the agents can get around a glitch to help a passenger.
At my first airline job I was in training for two weeks but we were shorted a week because Thanksgiving loads were too high and they needed help. We filled in as much as we could doing everything except getting on the computers. That ended up taking our third week of training and they ended up keeping us in the airport for hands on training from then on and just supplying the materials for the training we had missed. We were taught all the technical things but customer service was the most important thing. It was a family atmosphere and most of the employees got along and our customers loved us. It was a small hometown airline that flys the west/northwest.
It was a great place and atmosphere to work in, even though some days you were required to work long hours and had no breaks or lunch. Few people know that airline employees do not get to eat for long periods of time or at all and that could be an explanation for some of the grumpyness. Everyone was generally happy and familiarized themselves with other airlines in order to be better able to handle an irregular operation.
I made the HUGE mistake of leaving that airline for an opportunity to work at one of the top three. Mistake Mistake Mistake. Rude, not caring about passengers or their needs. Not getting luggage taken care of or tagged properly. Other new employees as well as myself were absolutely appalled at the way they worked and how absolutely rude the employees and managers/supervisors were. We were told to ‘herd’ passengers and don’t worry about how they feel because they all had a sheeps mentality anyway. I stood there with my mouth dropped open for at least twenty seconds. She said this in the middle of a pool of passengers while holding a bull horn she was using to yell at passengers with. Oh, did I mention training? I got NONE, I was an employee there for a year and never got any training. I was hurt because of their negligence and poor handling of passengers and have been out waiting for needed surgery and they are treating me like I am a leper, which come to think of it is the way they treat passengers.
You have to have a special mentally to be a good employee at an airline. Many airlines attract a good number of people with this type of mentality. How ever, many come for what they perceive as the glamour and flight benefits(which are disappearing or become something employees have to pay for and more restrictive). The pay is lousy, the medical benefits can be awful. But it’s still no excuse for staying in a job you don’t have the mental tools to do well. While many people feel like they are ‘trapped’ at the job for one reason or another.. they can find a better opportunity elsewhere.
I’ll have to exclude the people I used to work at the first airline–one young mother had a child with CP and needed the medical and flexible working hours and another had MS and needed the flexible working hours, there were several other people who had medical problems but we all had each others back and would come in at a moments notice when someone else could not make it. Man, I wish I had never left.
Ok, this rant got long but thanks for letting me get it out.
Oh yeah, I forgot!!
All airline employees who don’t –wish they DID work for Southwest!!
Pamby,
You noted that “Also, airlines do not make the decision to fly or not fly. They are told by a federal agency whether or not they can fly…Weather is not a call the airline makes.”
That is not always the case, unfortunately. Yes, the FAA can intervene and require an airline to delay or hold certain flights. However, NOTHING prohibits an airline from looking at the number of passengers on a flight, deciding it won’t be profitable to fly, and canceling that flight based on “weather”. In fact, there’s strong incentive to do so as “weather” delays don’t usually trigger any sort of compensation requirements in the contract of carriage.
Nobody is suggesting that airlines are too timid to fly in weather that might be safe. Rather, they’re suggesting that airlines are resorting to the weather excuse when there are other reasons they don’t want to fly – usually, a 2/3-empty plane.
In my opinion, the hub-and-spoke system increases those bad calls, because a given plane, it seems like, often spends most of its time going back and forth between the hub and the same city. So if the people flying from point A to the Hub don’t make it onto flight 1, they’ll make it onto flight 2 (hopefully) a few hours later, assuming there’s room. Eventually, enough people are stacked up at the hub that it becomes reasonable to fly plane 1 back to point A.
A point-to-point system, like Southwest uses, seems more vulnerable when a flight’s cancelled (that plane is scheduled to go from point A to point B to point C to point D to point E during the course of the day, and if it doesn’t make any one of those legs, everyone downstream is affected). So Southwest has an economic incentive to fly that plane even with a light load (not that this often happens much any more), because there are a lot more “full” legs down the route.
It would be interesting to do a study to see if I’m right on the economic impact of cancelling a flight on each system.
One of the big problems that the frontline airline employees run into is that their companies place restrictions on what the agents are allowed to offer the passengers. I worked for a regional carrier for AA and during delays/cancelations we had very strict guidelines of what we could offer the passengers, if we deviated from those guidelines, you can be sure that we got reprimanded for it as soon as manegement found out. I once got written up for protecting a passenger in F class on a overbooked flight although there were no aviable coach class seats. As for Joe F’s comments about being able to argue about the actual cause of the delay (ie; weather vs. mechincal) the information the gate agents are passing along to the passenger is the information that our companies put into the computer for us to see, we have no authority to pass on any other information or argue with the passengers on the issue.
I can confirm much of what Helen says—I took a US Airways part time job primarily for the benefits. But, at the time a few years ago, they did provide with one month of training at the Charlotte training center. It was difficult even with the training but I saw many like Helen put at the counter with no training. And the old timers are not about to help. They hang out in the break room and due to the union seniority, no one will say anything to them.
So do take pity on that person at the counter if they are struggling–they were probably put there with no training. If they are just rude to you, probably a senior employee!
Pamby – as a pilot the FAA does not tell the airlines when they can fly. There is no ‘formula’ that spells out who flies when. While I completely understand the confusion, it is sad that airline employees do not know how it happens and thus have NO idea what to tell the passenger. Pamby, I’m sorry you are overworked and underpaid and stressed out, but you have no real idea how the system works. Weather in the destination or origin city for the airliner is of course an issue – but in this case it was clear that the 2 ticket agents were talking about their family.
Here is what happens – to explain who controls a flight:
The airline wants to fly from JFK to ORD. The airline files a instrument flight rules flight plan [all flights over 18,000 feet must be on an 'IFR' flight plan] to travel from JFK to O’Hare via a specified route. That route is specified in a book of preferred routes. When the time comes to leave, the pilot calls Clearance Delivery of Air Traffic Control for ‘clearance’ to fly. If the weather is bad in NY or enroute then the capacity of the system might be affected. In the case of NYC, the airport itself is a limiting factor. If there are 30 airplanes waiting to depart and you have 2 minutes in trail, then it takes 60 minutes to depart. If the runway area gets too busy or there are too many airplanes going to New York, then ATC issues a ground stop, which stops airplanes from taking off for JFK.
If the airliner wanted to either leave or arrive under VISUAL flight rules, then they are not bound by the ‘ground stop’. However, airlines are not generally allowed to depart under visual flight rules because of their insurance requirements. An airline ***could*** depart or arrive at one of those airports under 18,000 feet under Visual flight rules legally. Often, smaller aircraft depart larger airport that are under weather or other departure delays under visual rules and then when they are far enough away from the busy airport, they pick up the IFR clearance to get higher and become under positive control. The reason why you are delayed is because your airline needs to operate IFR in order to be insured, not because the FAA REQUIRES that the flight operate IFR. That is a significant difference.
This is one of those lose-lose situations. There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides. I’ve seen ticket agents standing around while a line of passengers grows longer, and I’ve seen passengers make the most unreasonable requests imaginable.
I was checking in for a flight from BHM to DEN. All was going well until a passenger and his four kids wanted to upgrade their seats on a flight taking them eventually to Singapore. The ticket agent did his very best to accommodate the man, but he was totally irrational. They all had to be within 2 rows of each other, but 2 needed window seats and 2 needed aisle seats, and they should be as close to the front of the plane as possible, ad infinitum. The rest of us were about to explode.
Finally, the ticket agent told the man he would just have to wait for a few minutes, while the agent cleared the line a little. The man actually started spouting something about being a frequent flyer and having elite status, blah, blah. The agent said, “Well, these other people have tickets too, and some of them are probably elite status. You’re just going to have to wait.” I got to the counter with my e-ticket info (at that time, BHM didn’t have kiosks for UA) and made a point of speaking to the agent pleasantly, having my information at the ready, etc. I was processed through in record time. I have no doubt it was because I was nice to the man.
Although there are certainly notable exceptions when agents are going to be rude regardless, a passenger smiling and wishing them a good morning or afternoon makes it more difficult. As my parents always told me, good manners do not cost a dime. Insofar as it depends on me, I can do my best to be nice to these people.
You know what just floors me? Why is it that I have to constantly read about how bad the typical airline employee has it when it comes to dealing with the paying public? If you don’t like any aspect of your job/career — leave. You’re under no obligation to stay. No one is forcing you to do the job. Trust me: There are so many worse jobs out there that I can’t even begin to tell you how little compassion I can muster for the typical airline employee. I simply DO NOT CARE about your “pain”. I care about performance. I care – like the previous commentator – about not having to stand in line while two or more airline employees shoot the breeze while I’m possibly missing a flight, lugging baggage that gets heavier by the second while dragging a bad leg behind me in a ticket line that snakes around so long it looks like a ride at Disneyworld, etc., etc.,
Where in the world do airline employees get the notion that they have some special dispensation as it relates to dealing with the paying public? I’ve worked in sales my entire adult life and it never occurred to me that the customer couldn’t act any way they damn well pleased short of assaulting me…Do these airline employees get this notion from their unions? Do they get it from fellow employees who have been on the job longer than they? My personal favorite is when you’re discussing a situation with an airline employee and you happen to make the mistake of using the word “you” when obviously referring to the company: That ALWAYS gets the rejoiner that it is not THE PERSON you’re talking to who did such and such…as though you’re back in second grade and they have to explain grammar to you like you’re an idiot. It is a classic form of veiled disrespect that is intended to “set you straight” and show their superiority to you intellectually and morally… I can’t fly my own plane but I sure as heck can drive my own car and let me tell you: I drive everywhere I possibly can, go by train in other cases, and simply try to plan any and all leisure time in locations I can drive to. The air travel industry is so absurdly broken it defies all logic and all attempts to fix it and the sooner this government realizes that the way out of this mess isn’t new radar systems or forced schedule reductions or new plane designs or whatever but rather a truly modern rail system like those in Europe and parts of Asia will be the day we start down the path of fixing this gigantic mess. In the meantime, if you’re an airline employee and you’re fortunate enough to have a job (WITH BENEFITS!!!) stop acting like each customer that came before me punched you in the mouth and get real: either straighten up and smile like you mean it or find another line of work: Trust me – you won’t be missed.
Bixby – be realistic – Airline employees are people.
They are mostly stuck in the same situation we are – a lot of it
is outside their control – a lot of the time saying ‘quit if you don’t like it’ is
not not always an option – be realistic. If they all quit when they got pissed none of
us would be flying anywhere.
It’s their companies and the system that is broken and we all suffer as a consequence.
Courtesy and politeness should be the basis of every
conversation – as Chicky said it costs nothing.
My grandmother used to say the way you behave comes back to you.
I believe this to be true. Even if someone is rude or unhelpful it doesn’t mean you can’t
be polite even in the worst situation. It’s a state of mind and a statement about the person you are, it defines the impact you leave on the people you come into contact with in your life.
I can’t count the number of upgrades I’ve received through being courteous, polite, rational.