I’ll be frank. I anger a lot of travel brands. I’m not sure there are very many people out there at airlines and hotels, and working in loyalty, that actually like me very much. Some may put up with me, but I grate on them.
That’s because most people are fawning. Grant them a little bit of access, they say positive things. When I’m writing things that aren’t positive, I don’t even necessarily realize it! And when I write what I think, I’m not even remembering that anybody is reading. I’m enough on the spectrum that I just consider the thing in front of me and say what I think as though it doesn’t affect anybody, and no one will even notice.
I only realize that’s not the case when my phone rings, and a corporate comms person is on the other end to yell at me – not because anything I said is wrong but because it made someone in their C-suite angry and they have to be able to say they chewed me out over it.
My principles and coverage, though, is actually pretty simple and predictable. I think most of it is downstream from these five principles:
- Loyalty shouldn’t feel like work
- Brands should deliver the things they promise
- Companies should sweat the small stuff because great things are made up of details
- We shouldn’t lie to each other so much
- And we should respect our spaces
In other words, be honest, try hard, and respect your customers – and expect a modicum of respect in return. That seems to cover the myriad different things I often find myself writing about.
- Drip pricing. Resort fees, destination fees, property tax fees, hiding the real price to make it more difficult for consumers to compare prices. Just be honest about what the thing costs, and I get even more annoyed when the fee is buried in incomprehensible language and turns out to be an extra charge for a hotel’s windows, for use of electricity, or even paying the hotel’s debt gussied up as though it’s a government mandated cost.
- Broken reservations, broken seats, and failing to take care of customers when travel providers don’t deliver as-promised. When airlines sell a schedule, they should basically operate on that schedule and bend over backwards when they fail. And controllable (mechanical, crew) vs. uncontrollable (weather, air traffic control) is too much of a gamable crutch when airlines should be working hard to improve in the categories they like to pretend are uncontrollable.
Hotels should honor reservations, airlines should fully compensate passengers for involuntary denied boardings, and rental car companies that take reservations should actually hold the reservation.
And even more than that – when a premium service is advertised and purchased, falling back on ‘but the contract of carriage says we only owe you transportation from A to B’ is disengenous in extreme, whether it’s a broken seat or the case where a woman had her baby’s purchased seat taken for another passenger, they had to sit on her lap for the flight, and American wouldn’t provide a refund because the baby still got transported.
- Bare feet on bulkheads and seatbacks, painting or clipping toenails in the cabin, there are basic things we need to do to respect each other and avoid imposing excess costs on companies providing transportation because those costs ultimately flow to everyone else through higher prices or limited availability.
- Getting the small details right has outsized importance whether it’s bed frames extending beyond the mattress so that guests hit their shins walking in the room, or lights with no obvious way to turn off, not putting three different lettuce dishes in the same first class meal, or thinking through what items might actually be useful in a business class amenity kit.
The point is that it’s often not more expensive to deliver a quality product than it is to deliver a cheap one – the difference is as much about sweating the small stuff, not just checking a box. That plays out in pre-departure beverages and whether power outlets work or not, too.
- Let’s be a little bit honest about why things are the way they are and especially not through the guise of safety on everything just because it makes it more difficult to question ‘the narrative’. The TSA bureaucracy moves slowly and much of what we have today is ad hoc, and the result of intense lobbying by airlines and by contractors who sell them equipment. They incessantly tell us about actual threats that they’ve neutralized, most of which aren’t even real, but we’re encouraged to pretend there are top secret ones being stopped every day.
There are bad actors in the world. But being a bad actor is also hard. Most people don’t want to sacrifice themselves. Occasionally terrorists have to show some results to their donors, but mostly just want to belong to a cause and rise in relative status within their group. There aren’t actually active plots against aviation at all times, and hardening airport checkpoints (as though that really has happened to a great degree) just pushes threats elsewhere. That doesn’t mean we stop, but at least we understand some of the why behind the world we face as given, and helps resist making even worse decisions going forward.
- No-notice devaluations frequent flyer programs are fundamentally a play on trust. Consumers are asked to take actions and give loyalty up front on the promise of benefits and rewards later. Once customers have done this, it’s a rug pull.
Relatedly, hiding charts lets programs raise prices without admitting it. Claiming it’s about more granular pricing isn’t true, or providing lower prices isn’t true, you can do those things while publishing what to expect. It’s just when there’s a chart, and you change prices, you have to announce what’s changed. When there’s no charge, you just raise prices and consumers don’t know right away – probably not until far into the future when it turns out their points don’t go as far as they expected.
- Failing to deliver promised benefits and shrugging – these are promised benefits that customers have worked for. If you’re not going to actually deliver, don’t make the promise in the first place. That’s increasingly true for airline upgrades in the United States, where the promise hasn’t really changed since the days when 90% of first class seats went unsold to today when airlines run fire sales trying to unload those seats to the once a year flyer for $25 or $35 – anything to avoid actually delivering the upgrade to the $30,000 – $50,000 a year customer.
Maybe the hotel doesn’t deliver on ‘guaranteed’ 4 p.m. checkout, or gives a credit that doesn’t actually cover breakfast (and tax and tip) and increasingly from most programs there’s really no recourse. Program benefits are a promise where their fingers are crossed.
- Do the math right points are less flexible than cash, and carry even more devaluation risk, so aren’t worth ‘the retail price of the travel they can buy’ (even if that’s travel you’d pay retail for, unless it’s literally displacing an actual cash purchase on the same day). I place tremendous value on my points, but most people overvalue them for both good and for self-interested reasons (not naming names).
I think most of my themes here have been pretty consistent over the 24 years I’ve been writing, because they just reflect how I think about the world. You’re welcome to disagree, which is why I still have open comments that are barely moderated – generally just for extreme personal attacks or graphic and sexual comments or disclosure of personal information about others (that I notice, sometimes things slip through).
And the content is, I hope, consistent because after all these years I still write everything myself. The number of guest authors I’ve ever had can be counted on one hand I think still, and then only when there’s some rare unique content that I think will be interesting that I can’t offer myself.
I’ll be honest Gary, you’re not all that likable to most people. At least through the words on your blog. I’m sure you’re awesome in person. LOL.
Almost everyone I refer to your blog says something like that don’t like you on some level. I’ve heard others say “Oh, him….” when I mention VFTW.
But you know what? We keep coming back. Because the value you provide is extraordinary and you actually just lay down truth (well, let’s just say 98% of the time) and that’s what we NEED to hear. We don’t have to like the message. But we need it sometimes. And you do that extremely well.
Keep doing what you’re doing. You have the internal numbers of clicks and viewership, and you wouldn’t have been doing this for all these decades if it wasn’t crazy successful or you weren’t doing something right.
So, Happy 4th.
The bait and switch loyalty aspects of selling business class for peanuts while the high revenue customers see themselves as first loser on the upgrade list is probably the single most disingenuous act of recent of the MBA C-Suite. It infuriates me me to no end as a multi year United GS. Yet like sheep to the slaughter I keep coming back because the occasional short transfer service is a real perk. It should be automated notification with first right of refusal to the high flyers on the upgrade list that the they are offering the higher service class at a significant reduction. Although it countermands the loyalty process, I would still pay $30 to move up.
Here’s the weird thing @Mike I was doing the exact same thing before there were any readers or any ad revenue. I wrote this for years before an ad even when up so revenue was $0. I just have to write what I write, there is no filter, for better or worse, love me or hate me you get my genuine take, no vaccilation, no bending over backwards to be polite to a brand that offers money,
I will never measure up to Martin Luther, but ‘here I stand I can do no other.’
I’ve followed you for probably almost all of your years at this – from my biz travel years when I was routinely logging 150 to 250K miles a year. These days retired and lucky to be able to just buy biz class everywhere, I don’t much care about points. But the drop in loyalty to the customer seriously annoys me and has led me away from booking with companies where I even hold lifetime top status because I’d rather just pay another company and actually get treated as a valued customer. I have found you analyses over the years to be mostly spot on and it continues to amaze me to see a sideline commentator with more actual understanding of what makes customers choose than do the highly compensated owners of travel C suites. Coming from the technology world I was used to much more competent leadership. You continue to be a fun and informative read. Thanks for that and keep it up even if some folks don’t like you for it.
Summarizes why as a 1.5 Million Miler I fly Delta as a last resort for $, unless I can get a decent Virgin award flight.
The gate checks with empty bins is the latest scam.
You know, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was in a little book called, “Up the Organization”, written by Robert Townsend, a top executive 50+ years ago. He said to always remember that you are working for your customers, and that if you don’t properly serve them they will take their business elsewhere. It’s something I’ve tried hard to keep in mind when teaching, and in my interactions with other people.
In today’s world, when most employees don’t stay to retirement, industries consolidate, top executives seem to cycle in and out, and governments often are more concerned with institutional protection than serving citizens (nothing new there) such a mindset may uncommon. But in the long run forgetting who these companies exist for will only hurt the businesses themselves. I wish more people shaving services just to squeeze out a little more profit would consider that.
The current environment is not so much the result of one thing, instead it’s a bunch of small things that have cascaded.
Part of this is staffing. You alluded to this in an earlier post about how the social media presence at Southwest has been erased. It’s not so much that these corporations don’t care, it’s just that there’s no one left on staff to do the caring (and problem resolution).
Another part is that it’s no longer good enough to be a profitable corporation. Now you have to be a high multiple of profitable so that the stockholders get dividends and stock buybacks.
I sympathize with everything in your post (which is 100% accurate), but the days of valuing the consumers and users of your products and services are but a tiny speck in the rearview mirror.
The info you provide may not be liked, but I think enough of us are able to separate the message from the messenger.
i like gary because he’s an asshole
@gary thing you can improve on:
– tell the same stories about your youth travel once a year not once a month – we’ve heard them – yes i too have slept across a row of seats – i flew on a martin 404 just 3 months before southern retired them, and 26 years later flew on the 57th-to-last speedbird 2 – we’ve all got stories
– the same pics that have no relevance to the content used 100 times a year – less is more – you don’t need them anymore – your core crowd doesn’t need visual candy – if you are writing about delta service in the cabin – spend a little time and send a mail to your designated delta mba handler and ask if you can use a pic from their museum site, like this one (spaces removed makes the url work):
deltamuseum. org/ images/ default-source/ research/ timeline—decades/1970s/new-uniform-1975-serving-smock.jpg?sfvrsn=4937ca22_1
– editor function – use it – you publish with missing words, out of context words and misspelled words all the time – you are better than that – and it’s obvious when you publish an article which has been through an editing process and one you blast out before it’s ready
in summary, keep being you, and thanks for allowing us to comment for free (unlike enrilia)
@drrichard – you’ve never worked in the IT industry, have you ?
No I have not hagbard, how would you characterize it in these terms? I have great customer service (Apple) and others…not worth mentioning. What do you think?
@luckylarry
the consumers and users of your products are human fuel, soylent green, to be eaten, metabolized and converted in to exponential profit and buybacks
the corporations absolutely don’t care – when they wipe out entire pages of orgcharts they give zero forks about the impact on their remaining employees, their partners or their customers
larry ellison has destroyed 50000 careers and 100000 businesses and absolutely does not care
i disagree that the current environment is a series of small problems cascading
my view, and i’m not alone, is that oligarchical neo-facism and captured late-stage capitalism are the 2 main reasons for the current enshittification of our democracy and economy
happy 250th
Gary this is a well written article and you have explained how all of these businesses have failed to serve their clients!
Gary, you’re the only one in your space that I follow. Keep fighting.
Would love to hear about some recent tirades against you by American or Delta etc. (or Marriott/Hilton) , with links to the blog posts that caused it!
Teddy Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” speech works here on two levels. First, Gary often criticizes travel companies for their actions, but has he ever run an airline? A hotel chain? Even a hotel? Difficult decisions have to be made. Some will turn out to be correct, some, like those made by our resident retard commenter (thanks for not censoring the word retard btw), will be wrong. But there is always a logical reason why these people (aka companies) do what they do. In the end the free market will determine winners and losers, and things will self correct.
In the same way, it’s easy to criticize Gary’s takes, but have you commenters ever run your own successful blog? Has anyone ever come to a website just to hear your opinion? Ever had 100 people come and tell you how wrong, stupid, evil, ugly, old, etc you are? Have you ever had to come up with enough fresh content every single day to keep people coming back? Prolific posters here are the absolute worst. Go start your own blog, Timmy. And @retard, go start your own commune.
I literally can’t recall when I happened onto your blog Gary, but it was about the same time I started reading Ben’s blog and that happened before he started living in hotels.
I concur with the basic premises you lay out here, as I have since I started in this points and miles game (decades ago on FlyerTalk). Someone posted on FlyerTalk many years ago that if you’re not screwing travel companies, they’re screwing you and, although it’s a mercenary perspective, the basic premise is fair. As a traveler, if you’re availing yourself of mistake fares, points glitches, and other windfalls, you’re just getting screwed by points devaluations and loyalty cuts.
And as a fellow inhabitant of the spectrum, I have a multitude of issues with your takes, but they’re usually quibbles with tone, phrasing, or details, as opposed to a meaningful difference of opinion.
Very valid and well said.
Might be time for @Mike to return to Buenos Aires again… (@L737, pretty sure it’s *that* Mike… ‘DO cry for me, Argentina…’)
@Mantis — Have you met @DesertGhost, who also likes to attempt the ‘you-can’t-have-opinions-unless-you-run-an-airline’ trope (but, in your case, above, ‘blog’)?
Gary Leff… ‘man of the people’… *occasionally shills for corporations* (All good, sir. Thanks for what you do. And for hosting some shenanigans.)
It’s harder for some than for others to give up those roots of not being a corporate apologist and corporate shill. When making money enters the picture, the risk of becoming a sell-out rises and it often impacts the content enough that it becomes less interesting content to read.
That your audience is what it is even when loyalty programs have become way less rewarding to consumers does say something about why VFTW is still worth reading.
The comments are funny to me because I never considered you unlikable. Regardless, everything you’ve said here is right on, so keep saying it.
Every company in the hospitality business (and probably just about every company in general) should have a team of people who simply experience the product as a customer, give feedback, and are listened to. Instead they have “marketing” departments spending money on advertising that doesn’t work.
Gary,
I remember hearing you speak at FTU/Los Angeles back in 2012 and then meeting and chatting with you 1×1 later that day… and have been a fan of yours and your work ever since. Keep doing what you’re doing and never change!
It never occurred to me that Gary was not likable. Perhaps that is indicative of my own problems. Likable people are often selling likability rather than results.
Gary,
Thank you for writing with clarity, logic, facts, and , IMHO, a very balanced, apolitical, and even handed tone. You provide tremendous insight with useful information and useful strategies for mikes, points, credit cards, travel choices and travel disruptions. You are applauded for sticking up for common sense, the little person, with a practical and non-confrontational tone.
Thank you very much.
As a Frenchman, I don’t always share your concerns and, personally, I suffer (moderately) when you scratch Delta or Hilton BUT… You are a valuable source of constantly renewed information and comments, sometimes with the appropriate touch of snobbery. A detail that changes everything, for example and as you recently pointed out: the proper arrangement of shower gels, shampoos, or other lotions in bathrooms doesn’t seem like anything …but it’s IMPORTANT, mais oui! Thanks again.
Thank you Gary!