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Has the travel industry stopped listening to its customers?

July 5, 2007

Here’s an intriguing question raised by readers of my weekly newsletter: Has the travel industry stopped listening to ts its customers? The answer, many believe, is “yes.”

That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen the recent batch of customer surveys. Everyone from J.D. Power & Associates to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index has confirmed that travelers are giving the business a near-failing grade.

“I think that airlines, car rental companies, hotels, are only in the business of making money,” wrote Ed Bonnin. “And if they have to cheat — with hidden fees, for instance — they do it and will continue to do it.”

The responses came from my newsletter’s weekly “burning question” feature in which I ask a travel-related query. This week’s: “Do you feel as if your airline, hotel, car rental company or cruise line is listening to you? ”

Readers were particularly hard on airlines, which they described as callous and avaricious. But they said other parts of the industry do listen, on occasion. “Based upon my experiences, hotels are better listeners than airlines,” wrote Alan Birk. “Which, I think, is related to competition. You might have only two to four choices for an airline from Point A to Point B but you might have 10, 20 or more choices for a hotel.”

Not everyone was that optimistic, though.

“I don’t believe the travel industry pays any attention to consumers’ comment cards,” says Lynne Faimalie. “I have filled out many over the years — some positive — some negative. Never a single response from anyone in the industry and no changes made.”

I found some reason for hope amid the mostly negative emails about customer service. One of them came from reader Pam Barry, who wrote to me with her story of having to cancel a flight on Delta Air Lines last month because of an illness. “I was very surprised how easy it was to talk to them and how quickly they processed the refund,” she says.

Does Delta have its own stealth customer service initiative, too? Perhaps.

(Hat tip to reader and fellow travel writer Claire Walter for taking up the customer service cause in her blog and encouraging her readers to write to me with their stories.)

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

4 comments

  • Brad

    I, too, recently had a great experience with Delta. I had a complicated multi-city ticket through them, leaving from Los Angeles, where I currently reside. However, I just got relocated to D.C., so I had to call to change my tickets. I originally purchased them through Cheaptickets.com, and they wanted to charge $150 in processing fees PER TICKET (I have 2 tickets, mine and the wife’s), and then an additional $50 for each new ticket – so $400 to change 2 tickets. I called Delta directly, and they not only didn’t charge me anything to change the tickets, but gave me $280 in combined credit towards another Delta ticket in the future.

    As a long time hater of airline customer service, this was pretty amazing to me, and certainly makes me want to fly Delta more often.

  • Tabby Stone

    In late May we were stuck on a plane that wasn’t allowed to leave the gate at IAH for over an hour. The AC didn’t work and the flight attendants opened the doors and passed out water. They were so angry that they announced they would pass out comment cards and turn them in to the appropriate people.

    Almost a month later my wife and I each got the same form letter from Continental telling us they were sorry we had a problem, but made no reference to what had happened.

    I’ve never had a reply from any travel service comment card that had anything to do with the problem I wrote about and never had any response at all to the standard email address on airline websites.

  • Malcolm Robinson

    I often send notes to Hilton regarding pluses and minuses relevant to stays at the Hilton family of hotels. They always seem to be exceptionally responsive. Whether there is actually action on the problems, I do not know. However, the willingness of the complaint recipients to’listen’ and respond seems quite reassuring.

  • Pam Mandel

    I did a short interview some time back with the PR folks from AA about their women’s program for my column on BlogHer. I spent a long time on the phone with Mary Sanderson talking about both the program and what I want as a flier. I absolutely think she listened to what I had to say about the trials of air travel. She was able to present me with some concrete evidence of their responses to flier feedback.

    But I think there’s a difference in listening and acting on that stuff. And that there might be a big canyon to cross – whether it’s there intentionally or not is anyone’s guess – between the people that do the listening and compile the data and those that act on the change. I don’t need a hook for my purse as much as I need to be able to recline my seat without starting a war with the person behind me, for example. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of specific hotel type things, as I’m not much of a hotel type traveler, but I seem to remember there’s real evidence that hotels are acting on guest feedback too, providing women only floors to help guest feel more secure, better better ligating in the bathrooms for the cosmetic addicted, etc…

    So yeah, listening. Yes. I think that organizations may actually be hiring and placing well intentioned folks in their staff to listen. There are two problems though – often, you can’t reach a person who’s job it is to “listen to the customer” until you’ve set the wires on fire with your wrath. And when you do, that person maybe be able to compensate you for your issues, but little gets done to fix things on a grander scale so that whatever it was – your flight meal was served cold, your room was over a bar, you could not recline without a Camp David style diplomatic mission – never gets fixed.

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