Starting June 9, American Airlines is telling front line employees that they will start caring about the quality of their product.
American faces significant financial underperformance and – given their high costs, and customer preferences – need to become more premium in order to earn greater revenue. Management belatedly realizes this. Do they know how to do it?
They used to focus only on exact on-time departures (but without making the investments necessary to achieve them). The message from the top was that avoiding even two minute delays was the only priority. In CEO Robert Isom’s consistent messaging, when the flight is on time ‘the food tastes better, the seats seem comfortable.’
However, as I have written for years, reliability turns out to be table stakes. Customers care about the total experience. the product is more than just the schedule – merely having flights isn’t enough, what those flights are like matters.
It used to be that flight attendants complained if they called over missing first class catering on a long haul flight, managers would be yelling at them from the top of the jet bridge. And they might have to account for it later.
Effective June 9, American says they will begin to pay attention to cabin appearance (but to achieve this they need planes to have more time on the ground for cleaners to clean). They will care that catering is loaded. They will care that flight attendants follow service standards. I already posted that American will be revamping its buy on board program.
Here’s the memo that went out on Friday:
The problem here is the messaging.
- It comes to flight attendants from two middle manager (Managing Directors) while past narratives from the CEO have been they they are primarily competing with low cost carriers and shouldn’t spend any extra money.
- It begins with a veiled threat – that their model for consistent service will be their punitive attendance program where taking sick time when you’re ill (and contagious!) earns discipline points.
- There is no vision offered about what they are trying to accomplish, nothing about the stakes involved or how cabin crew fit in. There are no rewards for delivering on outstanding service.
This is a start, and good to see that they will begin to focus on delivering a consistent and clean product. But the CEO needs to lead, get out in front of the front line, and serve as an evangelist. Can Robert Isom do that?
AA flights are understaffed and their employees are totally unsupervised.
The content of this memo won’t change a thing.
@ R D Huestis
Singapore Airlines manages it’s onboard crews as if it were a small business.
On each flight there is an in-flight supervisor (who is distinguishable from the purple accents of their dress or tie) who has the overall responsibility for service delivery, helped by a chief in each cabin (wearing red accents) and by leads (green accents) and regular FAs (blue accents). Everyone, including informed passengers, know their role and expextations.
AA management can negotiate the same if they want. They can also train FAs better: most AA FAs in long haul business class don’t have a clue about the wine they’re serving other than the color (“white” or “red”) and maybe the nation (useless), while on SQ FAs will be well versant and there will always be one onboard who will have had extra training in wine and spirits they can summon or rely upon.
It’s the small things that matter (as anyone who forgot to wish a happy anniversary to his or her spouse can attest).
Even though a child, I remember the service of Pan Am Airways. Real utensils (yeah, 911 changed that permanently), wonderful meals, and service from a caring attendant. Never did we feel cramped like today’s travel. The airline that actually puts the flyer first and employees second will have my undivided attention.
The CEO needs to lead from the front lines? That’s pretty hard when he is flying private jets! Absolutely clueless!
They should start now this way they can get as many of the kinks worked out in time for the jump off date in June. Every airline has its bad apples. Some are worse than others. Get rid of the worse and focus on fixing the others. I just flew UAL from New Orleans to Newark. The contact I had with the agents at the airport to the flight attendant’s were perfect. Not to mention the plane was as clean as can be and the food was delicious. The plane left on time and landed early. Upper management needs to get middle management to be held accountable for issues/delays. When front line employees are treated well then things can be surprisingly done and done well.
I haven’t flown AA for years and I will never fly them if I have a choice. They used to be great. Now they are one of the worst of the legacy carriers.
I suggest giving passengers cleaning materials and ask them to clean their seats, tray table, etc. They can pass paper towels and disinfection spray to each other while flight attendants monitoring!
AA has somehow managed to end up with high costs but low morale and low customer service, something that you really have to screw up consistently to achieve. To expect passengers to pay high prices for service just a step above Frontier is unrealistic. What is AA doing to set itself apart from the budget carriers, especially with Southwest introducing extra legroom, power at every seat, assigned seats, larger overhead bins, employees with ties, and probably next will be first class and pay for bags? AA needs to add more first class seats, make their coach seats more comfortable, and for God’s sake, put in seatback entertainment! If they don’t do the latter, they will NEVER get close to profitability like Delta and United have.
The people on here leaving comments about AA planes being old don’t realize that AA has the newest planes, and Delta has the oldest planes. That being said, cleanliness and upgrades of the seats, especially seatback entertainment, make a big difference in how old the plane feels. If you ask people who has the newest planes, I doubt AA would come out the winner. Again, a monumental waste of billions of dollars because they go on the cheap with the little things after spending billions on planes. Truly stupid.
This hardly a shock.. remember American Airlines is just America West 3.0 in disguise.. America West being the first attempt at a ULCC/Allegiant type carrier and getting the moniker America Worst.
I tire of the union bashing. To believe that employees consciously consider or reflect, “Hey I won’t get fired doing this…” with each moment is ludicrous. Attorneys have a union as do physicians.
Management is busy outsourcing jobs to other counties, specifically their IT jobs, so that the top leadership can make more. They have little time to focus on the end product.
Why does it have to be 90 days from now? Efficiency, taking care of broken and unsightly fixes, and cleanliness is a given. Be competitive. Bring back seat back monitors, free WiFi, build up global hubs that aren’t hit with major weather issues like LAX. It seems like passengers and crews are getting stuck everywhere with minimal connecting times. Introduce more offerings and bring back staff for better service. It’s been one bad decision after another with this management.
If AA wants it’s cabins cleaned by station personnel and still depart on time, they will have to sacrifice their policy prohibiting cabin appearance leads who are white from giving direction to any non-white employee. Most ridiculous thing I have ever seen is a bunch of AA vest wearing employees sitting at a gate and telling their supervisor they were a racist for making them work. You know, by making everyone work, AA might be more profitable too.
Nothing will change if upper management and executives aren’t held as accountable as front line workers.
The fish stinks at the head…its not the employees but the management
I’ve flown AA a lot, nearly 2 million miles. There definitely needs to be a balance between making sure flights are on time, and making sure the best possible services are provided during the flights. One FYI thing that I’ve noticed on several recent shorter flights is that there seems to be a trend where the pilot announces that turbulence is expected during the flight, and that the flight attendants will be asked to remain seated during the flights; and then for the entire 1 hour or 1 1/2 hour flight, there’s absolutely no turbulence and no service. Also during short 1-hour flights, with no turbulence anticipated, some flight attendants say they will only be offering water since the flight is so short, where there was one flight attendant that actually brought out the entire cart to offer the full service of beverages (showing by example that a full beverage service is possible, where most flight attendants just choose not to do it). I’ve also noticed in general, that many workers across many different companies just don’t seem to have the work ethic that was more commonplace years ago. Hopefully some strategy can be implemented to make everything better!