Why Banks Are Designed To Seem Incompetent [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Why banks are designed to seem incompetent. Customer service is expensive, and we want everyone to be able to get a bank account even if they don’t generate enough revenue to cover decent service. So customer service is provided to most customers on the cheap, with a funneling process to use higher-cost service only when warranted. (Put another way, costs of obtaining service are imposed on the customer rather than incurred by the bank, until it’s demonstrated to cause a problem.)

    Meanwhile, for big problems especially those that could embarrass the bank there are side doors to use for escalation. And branches usually can’t help you. Also, regulation limits what banks can tell you, and what they’re willing to tell you for their own protection.

  • GHA Discovery giving out $25 credit on member birthdays

  • Delta keeps claiming to offer a premium experience, but I keep seeing photos like this in their social media stream in ways I never used to before the pandemic. They aren’t as premium as they used to be.

  • Forget driving UPS!

  • China’s Hainan Airlines will fly Boston to Seattle carrying only passengers flying onward from Seattle to Beijing. This lets them squat on both Boston and Seattle routes with just a single flight. They cannot legally fly domestic passengers just from Boston to Seattle.

  • Delta-controlled Wheels Up unsurprisingly looking to do deals with Air France KLM and Virgin Atlantic

About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  2. That looks like premium trash. Again Delta shows its supremacy by having best in class trash in the first class cabin.

  3. It will be interesting to see if the Hainan Airlines flight makes money. The flight arrives in Boston early enough to catch flights to a lot of cities in the eastern half of the USA. Why the return flight is not nonstop is a question that I cannot answer. Maybe they will see if there is enough interest to make the stop in Seattle non technical. Maybe there is a cost advantage by not flying fuel as far.

  4. Wow, it’s good to learn that tipped casino union bartenders make $150k a year, and a banquet server earns about $200,000. For unskilled labor, those professions earn more than many union flight attendants or the starting salary of a mainline first officer.

  5. Yea vegas tipping is out of control. It’s out of control in the US in general. Lower your tip 5% or just start flat fee. Percentage makes no sense.

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