Frequent flier programs may be the crack cocaine of the travel industry, but if you want an airline to respond to your inquiry, being elite gets you priority treatment. So says a new survey of airline customer relations departments I’ve obtained.
The poll of 60 airlines conducted on behalf of the Worldwide Airline Customer Relations Association reveals that air carriers systematically and intentionally respond to queries from non-elite passengers slower than to their frequent fliers. How much slower? Anywhere from a few hours to days.
For example, “performance targets” for non-premium customers average 18 hours by phone, 35 hours by e-mail and 15 days by postal service, according to the survey.
But for the jet set, the targets are considerably shorter. By telephone, the target is 16 hours, by e-mail it’s 32 hours and by letter, it’s 8 days.
(Interestingly, the air carriers don’t appear to draw any distinctions when it comes to lost luggage. Their target response times average a jaw-dropping 21 days, with some respondents setting their goals as far out as 90 days. No wonder there are so many luggage complaints!)
These numbers are telling for several of reasons. First, they offer a glimpse into the inner workings of an airline industry that frequently promises its customers to call them “right back.” That may, indeed, be their intent, but their “performance target” — the number used to evaluate these customer service representatives — often says otherwise.
Second, there’s a significant gap in response times when it comes to letters. To me, that suggests letters are assigned the lowest priority when it comes to customer service. The poll reveals that that more than a quarter of customer inquiries are by snail-mail (the majority, 43 percent, are by e-mail or through the airline Web site; 17 percent are by phone, 5 percent by fax and another 4 percent are in person, while 6 percent are designated as “other.”)
At this point, I would not bother sending a letter to an airline, given the results of this survey.
And finally, as a customer who flies frequently but refuses to play the mileage-collection game, I’m troubled that my inquiries are sent to the back of the line. The egalitarian in me thinks airlines should respond to the most urgent inquiries first — the ones involving imminent flights or recently lost luggage.
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Gatwick is now requiring that you put your PASSPORT thru the flatbed xray! This can only mean one thing, that somehow the electronics contained inside the passport acts as some kind of shield for the walkthrough scanner. Elliott, sounds like a good story for you!