A Travelers’ Tale of Two Airlines (@united vs @southwestair)
A hurried shower, followed by a hastily packed bag. Then, the race to the taxi stand (Figure 1). Should be easy to get a cab at 5:45 am in Las Vegas, right? Only the late night crew roll into a casino this late or early in the morning on a Tuesday. Who’d be flying out so early? So much for that theory. A line forms 50 deep outside. Eveyone is half asleep, and headed to McCarran – Las Vegas airport from Caesar’s Palace at 5:30 am. I figure Southwest 2286 takes off at 6:25 am, should be plenty of time. I keep consoling myself. At 5:50, I get into my cab. I instruct the driver not to take the freeway and to go local.
Figure 1. Just Another Day At The Las Vegas Taxi Stand
I get to the self-service kiosk to check in. I get the dreaded <DING!>. I’m told my bag will be checked late and it could risk being sent on a later flight. At 6:00, I’ve missed all normal cut-off windows. Most airlines cut you off at 30 minutes prior and I am really late. I’m ready to accept my fate. I’m ready to be told to get on the next flight. Strangely enough, the gate agent notices that I’m late and does everything to hurry me on-board. She tells me that there is a chance my bag won’t make it but they’ll do their best. She kindly reminds me check-in is 30 minutes prior and suggests I take another security entrance to improve my odds of passing through TSA in time. She also lets me know that she’s told the gate agent I may be late. I finally get through TSA and get to the gate with 2 minutes to spare. The aircraft door isn’t closed. In fact, it’s open and waiting for me to board. I hop on, pass out, and arrive in San Jose. In some modern day miracle, the bag also has arrived with me. I thank the travel gods.
Flash back one week earlier, the same morning sequence occurs in Las Vegas. This time with rental car in tow, I head to the rental car return center at 4:00am for a 5:30 am flight. A staffing issue occurs with the “consolidated rental center transportation” and no buses arrive until 4:30 am. I think to myself, I still have time. I rush to catch United Airlines 479 to San Francisco. The bus arrives at 4:45 am. I rush to the kiosk and arrive for check-in at 4:47 am. The kiosk tells me to see an agent. I wait another 3 minutes in the uber premium line (a.k.a. Global Services). The agent looks at my ticket and tells me in a stern and disapproving voice, I have to wait for the next flight which is at 11:49 am.
I flash my Global Services card in a last ditch attempt for empathy. The agent tells me that policy is policy. United can’t check me in as I miss the cut-off. She tells me that I should know better and come to the airport earlier. The Las Vegas airport is so big, the bag would never get to the plane on time. They won’t let me take off without my bag. There’s no point in arguing at this point. I have a speech at 11:00 am to get to. I rush over to the Southwest counter to find the next flight. The agent asks me what’s wrong. I tell her I need to get on the 6:30 am. She says, no problem. I give her all the details and she issues me a ticket in 5 minutes. I make it to the keynote but I’m very bitter about United and how they have treated me. I was a happy Continental flyer before the merger, you can read all about it here.
Social Data Quantifies Qualitative Experiences – United Ranks Last Among The Three Carriers
By now, most folks have seen what happened when “United Breaks Guitars“, the tale of an awful customer experience for Dave Carroll who had his guitar broken. When the airline failed to take responsibility, he took to the web. With over 11.9M views as of this blog post, this social media epic fail epitomizes what happens when companies ignore their customers and shirk responsibility for resolving legitimate complaints. But what happens when an airline completely chooses to ignore social media as a channel? Do customers go away? Do they just jump to another channel? Are these social analytics tools reflective of the general customer base?
Using Attensity Analyze 6.0, a comparison was made among the three airlines. We selected two best in class low cost carriers (i.e. Southwest Airlines and Virgin America) and United Airlines to answer this question (Figure 1). Analyze 6.0 took 12,863 public comments from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums (user forums, discussion forums, LinkedIn Answers, etc) YouTube videos, mainstream news and more to gather this data (see Figure 2).
Figure 1. Twitter Accounts For The Three Airlines
Figure 2. Attensity’s Analyze 6.0 In Action With Feedback Analysis On Three Select Airlines More…
