Tag Archives for american.
At the beginning of last week I wrote about American’s service training for new flight attendants. Basically they don’t get any although the airline says they’ll start offering a (very) modest amount next year.
Several flight attendants have weighed in on this discussion. They share their stories.
For Black Friday last year they offered miles at 1.77 cents apiece and they did that the year before too. So it’s no surprise they have a Black Friday offer so sell miles at 1.77 cents apiece again through November 26.
United, American, and Southwest take very different approaches to passengers changing seats. On Southwest their boarding process makes it a free for all. American flight attendants are Switzerland. And United’s are the tax man.
The U.S. is the world’s aviation largest market — by a lot. The EU as a whole is larger than Chinese market. The UK is the biggest aviation market in Europe, so perhaps Brexit will be what causes China to grow larger than Europe.
Japan is a bigger market than India, though a decade from now will that still be the case? India has nearly doubled in the past seven years. (So has China.)
We know that mechanics are unhappy about their inability to get a new contract and anecdotally have been causing some of the airline’s operational challenges. Flight attendants are embarrassed by the new domestic product that the airline offers. Perhaps survey data that can be seen in a spreadsheet will underscore some of what employees have been telling management each month already.
American is introducing a flight to compete with all of the painful experiences they’ve offered to customers in the past — and that’s certainly worse than anything else they’re offering today.
Starting in May their Miami to Brazil’s capital of Brasilia flight will no longer be flown by a Boeing 757 with lie flat business class seats. Instead they’ll run the flight with a Boeing 737 MAX. Since the plane has no ovens in back, economy customers will eat hummus.
At the most recent employee question and answer session with American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, a flight attendant asked about the airline’s inflight product — she hears from premium customers that the product United and Delta offer are better, and she worries because new American Airlines flight attendants aren’t getting training in service, and ‘half’ of flight attendants don’t follow the service standards that do exist.
Ok, she did more than ask about the product. She looked right at her CEO and said American’s service standards “suck compared to United and Delta.”
This is literally the opposite of “hang up, call back.” It’s almost like a Yakov Smirnoff Russian Reversal joke, “In Soviet Russia, American AAdvantage calls you!”
I’ve never had an agent check for award space after a call and proactively follow up before. That’s amazing. Has an agent ever gone above and beyond like that for you?
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker says their relentless focus on exact on time departures is what customers want, even though it means that upgrades don’t get processed, flights don’t get catered, and customers are forced to gate check bags unnecessarily.
Airlines that achieve operational reliability do it by getting the right resources in place to accomplish everything that’s necessary to get planes out on time, not by requiring employees to skip steps and inconvenience customers in order to achieve operational goals.
In the spring American Airlines started offering free alcoholic beverages to passengers seated in their extra legroom Main Cabin Extra seats, copying Delta (although Delta offers snacks too). American’s flight attendants have expressed frustration.
They’ll say they’re concerned about customers drinking too much, but the real concern appears to be having to do more work.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
