American’s new Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden appeared on the Airlines Confidential podcast to highlight her airline’s “renewed focus on customer experience.”

An America West veteran, she came up through the ranks of Doug Parker’s airline and has a background in finance and revenue management. That’s not what you’d obviously expect for someone picked to ‘represent the voice of the customer’ but it does mean that she knows the language and how to talk to the bean counters who have internalized CEO Robert Isom’s mantra not to ‘spend a dollar they don’t have to.’

She outlined her priorities as “everything.” There’s so much that needs to be done, but she’s starting with figuring out “the most important things…for our customer.”

• get insights from customers
  
• align the different parts of the airline – “commercial and operations, but also finance and corporate real estate and technology.”

And this cashes out first in what she’s calling “disruption management.” I hoped this would be ‘creative destruction’ since there are so many policies in place that need to be rethought at American. But she’s talking about improving things for customers during irregular operations. Still, we have seen the airline walk back its draconian changes to standby from last year. So that’s a good start.

There are actually a number of pieces of good news at American.

• New premium cabins. The new delivery Boeing 787-9Ps are gorgeous.

  

  The business class suites are excellent. Premium economy is excellent, too (each seat with both foot bar and foot rest).

  

  Boeing 777-300ERs will be retrofitted with a similar cabin, but there are no announced plans to upgrade the rest of the fleet. New delivery Airbus A321XLRs will get a business class suite with doors and new premium economy as well.

• Enlarged premium cabins coming to Airbus A319 and A320 aircraft, each getting an additional row of first class. And the Boeing 787-9Ps and 777-300ERs will have more premium seats than their predecessors. These additional seats are achieved, though, densifying the aircraft and taking space from lavatories and galleys.

• New lounges. American just opened its Philadelphia Flagship business class lounge. A six year delay means it’s in the airline’s new lounge aesthetic, which is a vast improvement. The new Washington National E Concourse club, Denver, Newark, and Philadelphia A-West Admirals Club feature this design. They’re going to build a new business class lounge in Miami, repurposing the current one for additional Admirals Club space. And they’ll finally start building the Austin lounge they promoted four years ago.

  
  Philadelphia Flagship Lounge

  Unfortunately there are no announced plans to refurbish existing lounges in the new design, and while their lounge food program is more robust than it used to be it still trails Delta and United.

  
  Washington National Airport E Concourse Admirals Club

• Free wifi. This is coming next year to 90% of the fleet (Intelsat and ViaSat-equipped planes, but not Panasonic-equipped widebodies). Delta and JetBlue are already free, while American’s wifi is the most expensive in the industry. United is going free as they bring Starlink onboard, which is the fastest with the least latency. ConciergeKey members get free wifi now, while the rest of us wait for sponsorship revenue from AT&T to begin coming in.

• Better policies like fewer frictions in standing by for a flight, and no longer collecting headphones in business class an hour before landing (waking customers up to do it – the reason I always declined the headsets in the first place, hoping to be spared this exercise).

  

  Interestingly, Garboden reports that they’ve “seen a 10% reduction in gate checked bags just within” the past couple of months, though it is not exactly clear what change exactly drove this – but if they can maintain it, it’s a big win for the customer.

  

• Improved coach food for sale American has started offering more food for sale, and offering it on more flights. They don’t offer as many options or offer it on comparing flights to United or Alaska, but they’re beginning to invest here. (Alaska’s is probably best, but even United offers hot food.. that occasionally gets raves from flyers.)

  

  That’s important, because most passengers fly coach. Premium cabins get the bulk of the attention, but that’s not the bulk of the experience. There’s less money to invest here, but thoughtful and careful attention to the coach experience matters because it’s what most customers are buying, what most customers know, and how the airline’s reputation is formed (plus, many of today’s customers will be tomorrow’s premium customers).

  

There are a lot more policies to go, like the most restrictive same-day change policy among major U.S. airlines (you have to keep your original routing and only have access to very limited inventory) and most-restrictive rules for through-checking bags (you can’t even do it on separate American Airlines tickets).

And most of the improvements we’re seeing have been in the works for a long time, far predating the new Customer Experience Organization at the airline.

• New business class suites date to 2019, with the specific seat under consideration since at least the start of 2020.
  
• The Philadelphia Flagship lounge was slated to be finished before the pandemic.
  
• Free wifi was in the works in 2019 as well, with press releases literally written to match whatever Delta announced (they were expected to do free wifi then but found their planes lacked sufficient bandwidth to keep up with demand when price went to zero).
  
• Even not taking headphones early was a test that began in 2022.

So the real question is going to be whether they’re:

1. Willing to make real new investments when those cost money, such as investing in their lounge program and retrofitting existing Boeing 787s and 777s with new business class.

2. Make bets on their ability to turn a better product into more revenue, for instance by removing seats from aircraft and adding more extra legroom Main Cabin Extra product (they significantly trail Delta and United with these, and they’re often not available to buy – let alone in enough quantity for a family to buy several).

3. Going to make customer experience a focus throughout the company – historically there’s been little benefit to managers to pay attention to the details because a seat was viewed as a seat, amenities were box checking, and the goal was to get each required element done at the lowest cost (so wine selection gets outsourced to the vendor, for instance, at an agreed-upon budget).

And, of course, whether the importance of how a customer experiences their travel can be translated out to the front line from check-in counter to gate agent to crew on board. While United gets too much credit for having shifted to premium, significant improvement can be traced to the time that former CEO Oscar Munoz spent visiting with employees across their system, convincing them that they had a bright future and that they needed to work together to achieve that.

Garboden reports both to Chief Strategy Officer Steve Johnson and to Chief Operating Officer David Seymour. She needs to please both, and convince CFO Devon May to go along with investments. And we haven’t seen Robert Isom out on the front lines the way that Munoz was.

The Airlines Confidential discussion touched on American’s new Customer Experience Advisory Board, which brings in folks from Auberge Resorts, Marriott and Disney. But it doesn’t bring in customers – Garboden says that these folks are also road warriors. Disney charges a lot, nickel and dimes, and Marriott no longer stands for the consistent guest experience they did a decade ago. Maybe the right advice is flowing here, maybe it isn’t, but I doubt that’s the binding constraint.

Garboden, unfortunately, sees legroom on the plane as fixed althogh I’m not sure why that should be the case. Certainly interior retrofits across an entire fleet can be years-long affairs (“when you put together a LOPA, it takes years to do that”), but adding Main Cabin Extra and removing a row of seats (say, to match United on like-aircraft) doesn’t actually take very long.

Her excuse for having insufficient extra legroom seats is that “main cabin extra was still a newer product” when they came up with the interior configuration for their 737 MAX and 737-800 aircraft (that first debuted inflight in November 2017). But United introduced Economy Plus seating in 1999, and newness isn’t why Main Cabin Extra got shrunk so much.

It’s that American’s plan for the aircraft originally had regular coach seats at 29 inches of pitch (the distance from seat back to seat back) rather than 30, there was an outcry, and they reconfigured their plan on the fly to squeeze the Main Cabin Extra section rather than remove seats in order to avoid going down to Spirit Airlines territory in the very back.

She does acknowledge that “if we looked at it today, would we think about it differently? We probably would.” If you don’t have coach seats that come at a modest buy up, customers don’t have the opportunity to buy up.

Garboden also acknowledges that they “largely defined [customer experience] as running a reliable operation” but “that’s almost table stakes at this point.” This is the exact language I’ve used nearly 80 times on this blog in the past 10 years.

At the conclusion of the interview, guest co-host Henry Harteveldt offers that she’s the right person for the job but (it’s long, but worth reproducing in full):

Heather has to help American Airlines recover from, frankly, a decade or more of neglect to its customer experience. …[T]here is so much that the airline has not invested in. And in fact, the airline has gone backwards. It’s removed in the inflight entertainment screens, for example, from the legacy American Airlines narrowbody fleet. It has that awful and ironically named Oasis. Having a configuration on the 737 fleet, there is no God in the American Airlines Oasis configuration. It’s just miserable.

And you know, American, as I said, a few weeks ago, has a very gray, murky brand image. I certainly appreciate the fact that Heather has been, I think, very frank in her assessments of what they want to do.

I like the fact that she has created a customer experience advisory board. You know, you can certainly question some of the selection of Aubuerge is a phenomenal luxury hotel brand. But it caters to a very, very narrow slice of guests at the top, literally the top 1 to 2% of travelers. Marriott certainly has a much broader portfolio of products, but also has allowed its brands and hotel owners to not enforce certain service and brand standards in order to keep them in the network. And Disney has the theme parks. But if you go to the theme parks, it’s not exactly a great experience. The rides can be fun. They’ve got great brand franchises like Star Wars and others. But they charge you through the nose for a ticket. And then they charge you for the skip the line passes and everything else. It’s almost a negative customer experience as well as a costly one. Almost like an airline.

So I’m just wondering what kind of advice will they provide? And even if they do provide the advice that American needs, will American listen? I know Heather will. And I think one of the greatest strengths in Heather’s background is the fact she does come with a revenue management and finance background. So she speaks the lingua franca, if you will, of American. That is an airline ruled by finance and ruled by revenue management. But it needs to be ruled by the customer.

And so it’s going to take a lot more than improving the mobile app, which the improvements are good, but they’re not great. American Airlines used to set a standard of excellence for not just the US airline industry, but for the global airline industry. They used to be innovative. They used to be pioneers. I’d like to see that same energy come back.

I hope Heather can help make that happen. She’s got great people working with her. I think they’re very dedicated to it. And you know, we also have to acknowledge that American is a massive complex enterprise. You don’t fix anything quickly with any airline of that size. So even if American did want to change the low bar on certain aircraft, it’s going to take time. If they want to improve lounges, which they need to, it’s going to take time. If they want to improve the onboard experience, which they need to, it’s going to take time.

Meanwhile, United and Delta are ahead of American. And that gap that they have over American, I suspect will continue to grow. The exciting thing for Heather and her colleagues, can she convince American to overtake and leapfrog, or United and Delta are and where they believe they’re going? So that American is once again, the leading premium brand. If they are, I think they have the potential to be highly successful, especially when you look at the hubs that they have, and the opportunity to leverage the fleet that they have.

The problem is that American Airlines has high costs, but an average product. Customers choose them on schedule and price, not because they’ll go out of their way to do so – the argument Delta makes about their business.

American needs to earn a revenue premium given their business (or shed the kind of costs that can only be accomplished at the courthouse). So as a business they need to attract cusotomers and convince them to pay more because they’re better. To do that they actually have to be better!

Whether or not they can get there is an open question. I am skeptical-but I am hopeful. In the meantime there are absolutely incremental wins, and a lot of positive things about the airline for customers to look forward to.