Tag Archives for cleaning.
Southwest is experimenting with bringing cleaners on board between flights — but only to clean the premium extra-legroom section, leaving the rest of the cabin to the usual quick flight-attendant “tidy.” A flight attendants union leader says the trial creates a two-tier experience, likening it to Titanic class service, and warns passengers will notice fast when the front looks freshly cleaned and the back doesn’t.
An American Airlines ramper named Dre lays out what’s wrong with passengers. They don’t care about the condition they leave the plane in when they get off. They leave food on the ground. He’ll find diapers in the seats. Didn’t your mother teach you better?
The least that an airline can do is clean the cabin and check that the seats are working before boarding the plane.
As a general matter if you see something white it’s being changed, if it’s multicolored it was probably purchased specifically to avoid showing stains. Pricier chains have changed bedding more regularly than budget hotels. There was once a standard in the industry for mid-priced and below to change duvets four times a year coinciding with a deep clean of the room.
Remember when airlines pushed messages through their apps, and in announcements, that your flight was both cleaned and sanitized prior to boarding? That was only just a few months ago.
Last summer American Airlines implemented an elegant solution for disinfecting planes. The chemical SurfaceWise2 was approved in Texas and was touted as killing viruses on surfaces for two weeks. There’d be no reason to spray planes as often during the pandemic.
It turns out the stuff may not actually work.
I’m so thankful for so much in the face of the last year. I’ve been able to grow closer with my family, even as I’ve given up so much international travel. Hopefully there are some things that we’ve learned in the last year that can continue to make travel and other parts of life even better.
For several years American Airlines has had a laser focus on ‘D0’ exact on-time departures. It hasn’t made them an on-time airline, but they’ve sacrificed cleaning, processing upgrades and standbys at the gate, and wouldn’t hold even the last flight of the day for connecting passengers.
Gate agents, used to getting called in for missing D0, and used to managers yelling at them as they try to get flights out, haven’t fully adapted to the need to prioritize aircraft cleaning in the Covid era on just pushing the aircraft back on time. Before the pandemic sacrificing cleaning to get planes out was the airline’s explicit policy.
When passengers see a messy cabin, they tend to leave it that way themselves and perhaps even in worse condition (Cf. lavatories). It’s the ‘broken windows theory’ of policing applied to an aircraft cabin. Slovenliness begets slovenliness. But the reverse is also true. Hold up your end, keep things looking respectable, and your fellow passengers are more likely to do so as well – and an airline’s employees and contractors will have a much easier time maintaining the plane for the people flying in your seat next, too.
In the past when airlines struggled financially one of the first areas they cut back was cleaning, going over a year even without a deep clean. Despite Covid-19 being a bigger threat to airlines than 9/11 and the Great Recession combined, airlines have stepped up their cleaning to give passengers confidence to fly. It’s a welcome change that I hope continues even after the pandemic is done.
Nonetheless the FAA has concerns over some of the chemicals being used, and how they’re applied.
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 »
