Plea from a frustrated traveller

In a report in the Australian, Bernard Salt, KPMG Partner and Australia’s leading demographer says as a frequent flyer I’m sick of the repeated, platitudinous and meaningless apologies from airline staff.

At the risk of sounding like a business wanker (see last week’s column), I have just completed a sobering task.

I have worked out that I have taken 160 flights this year.

Some 64 per cent of my flights have been domestic; most have been Qantas business class.

I use Virgin and Jetstar where there are gaps in the Qantas network, such as Melbourne to Hobart.

International travel is also mostly Qantas business class, although this year I’ve used other airlines such as United, BA, Emirates, Air New Zealand, Iberian, Air Vietnam, Cathay, Singapore, American Airlines, British Midland, Delta and Air Berlin.

My travel schedule for 2008 is shaping up to be similar to 2007.

My point is that I am an experienced business traveller and I have a number of issues that I’d like to flag with all airlines as well as with Australian airport operators.

At the Sydney and Melbourne airports the security check-in line can at times extend up to 30 people or more. Why isn’t there a separate security check-in for frequent business travellers? (And the fact that these queues are longer at Heathrow is not the point, since that place is in a league of its own.)

Waiting in line for 20 minutes simply to X-ray carry-on baggage is bad enough but this procedure is made all the more galling by the convention of allowing Qantas (and I assume other airline) staff to walk straight to the top of the queue.

Their logic is, no doubt, that they travel almost every day and so they shouldn’t have to wait in line with the plebs.

But what about people like me, business travellers paying business class margins, who travel 160 times a year. How does this frequency compare with a pilot’s? And yet I am treated the same in the security queue as a once-a-year tourist!

And then comes the baggage debacle. In all of these flights my baggage went astray only once.  But the baggage issue is not the losing of items – it is the slowness of retrieval.  In my experience Melbourne airport, where delays of up to 40 minutes are not uncommon, is the worst offender.

Business class baggage is tagged “priority”, which I initially understood to mean that handlers placed these items first on the carousel. Not so.

The fact is that in all of my domestic flights I found that an item tagged “priority” might come out first, but then again it might also come out in the middle or indeed among the last of the baggage.

My perception is that the purpose of tagging an item “priority” is to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling at check-in but in reality this process means nothing in the baggage-handling process.

Mr Airline, could I suggest the following. Forget expensive advertisements showing Miss World stewardesses smiling sweetly at business class travellers, and reinvest that money in improving the speed of your baggage retrieval system.

And if you need a benchmark to see how it’s done, try Berlin, Philadelphia and Helsinki.

The next item on my agenda is “honesty and transparency in dealing with customers”. And by this I mean, how customers are told that flights are delayed or cancelled. Over the years of flying I’ve learnt to speak fluent airline.

Here’s how it works:

“Due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft, flight 404 to Sydney will be delayed by five minutes.”

You see, when someone tells me that something will happen in five minutes I foolishly think that this means five minutes from now. You know, “five minutes”, meaning a time that is half way between four and six minutes.

Not so.

In airline-speak ‘five minutes’ actually means “in 10 minutes we’ll make another announcement”. “Delayed by 30 minutes” means “don’t bother approaching staff for 40 minutes to ask questions because they know nothing”.

And “ladies and gentlemen, there is a technical problem with the aircraft and we have called for engineers” means “this plane ain’t going nowhere for three hours”.

Then come the apologies: profuse; breathlessly gushed; and proffered with such little effort that they have no value.

It strikes me that Generation Y staff, in particular, believe that if they apologise for a problem then that problem ceases to exist.

“You’ve been waiting in line for 15 minutes while we get our act together and summon extra staff to help with business class check-in?”

“No worries, when you get to the counter I’ll apologise for the delay and then we can both pretend that it never existed.”  “And when you come back tomorrow and the same thing happens, I’ll apologise again.” “And again.”

Now I don’t know whether this is me being picky, but if there’s a problem, I don’t want a rote apology – I want the problem owned and fixed.

Could someone in airline customer-service training please remove the instruction to offer “platitudinous but meaningless apologies” from the program, and replace it with “ownership of the problem”.

My comments might be viewed by some as the end-of-year grumbles of a jaded traveller, and to some extent this might be true.

However, what the airlines need to know is that these complaints are discussed frequently among business travellers. Indeed, the jaunty ice-breaker to any business meeting these days is talking about how horrendous the flying and baggage-retrieval experience was. Everyone has an anecdote worthy of telling and retelling.

And the worst thing is that there seems to be no accountability for the incessant delays in the travelling process. Any complaint is invariably shrugged off with a “you wouldn’t want us to skimp on security, would you?” To me, this seems to be the eternal excuse for slack service.

Australia’s postal service and railways are subjected to independent checks as to the timeliness of their service delivery. As a frequent flyer, I want to see Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin and now Tiger publicly audited for their ability to deliver service against a schedule of departure times.

“Wheels up” any later than 30 minutes after scheduled departure is “late” by my reckoning.

And baggage that fails to arrive more than 20 minutes after the plane doors open is also “late”.

I do understand that “weather” issues cause many delays. But if I knew that, say, 90 per cent of delays were due to acts of God, then I would be a far happier traveller. After all, the airline is doing its best.

However, as it currently stands, I rightly or wrongly attribute every agonising minute beyond departure time to various forms of airline incompetence.

As for baggage delays, I can see no legitimate reason why 200 people should be regularly held in abeyance for 40 minutes waiting to retrieve their baggage. If this is a staffing issue, then simply employ more staff. And keep employing baggage handlers until service benchmarks are met.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG Partner

A Report by The Mole from The Australian