Has this happened to you? You hold a booking in your hand that you have not altered, but when you arrive at the airport, airport personnel see a different booking than the one you hold! You may say not in my dreams, but it has happened. It is chaotic to both the passenger and the airport personnel when it happens to resolve it.
Millions of passengers do travel without any incidents with their bookings made via many travel agents, online booking sites and on airlines own websites. But when something goes wrong, airlines find it tough to recover from that. A good service capability will make such recoveries for both the passengers and airlines bearable.
Lack of education and a common sense approach is at the core of many problems that plague the service industry. This applies to services that are provided as follow up from an incident that has occurred unintentionally. I would like to recount some of the worst service experiences in the next few blogs to highlight what could have been done better to provide a better customer service without worrying about the astronomical costs that are usually implied to provide such a service.
Here is a real world encounter that an airline passenger experienced. The incident is true and verifiable even though the identity of the passenger and the airlines are concealed here.
A shocker at the departure airport returning home:
- When passenger arrives at the airport to check-in, the booking that airport personnel is seeing is different from the printed booking held by the passenger. The passenger’s reiterates that the booking was done months ahead and no changes were done either by the agent or by the passenger after starting the trip.
- Airport personnel tell the passenger that only call center can see the original booking to reinstate it. With no help from the airport personnel, passenger seeks outside help to reach the call center (located in a different from the country of departure) to see whether they can see the original booking as booked by the passenger to get it reinstated. Even the call center call was not help as they were also seeing the booking as seen by the airport personnel.
- Passenger was asked to pay the difference in fare if the airport personnel can manage to confirm the flight as per passenger’s booking. If passenger decides to fly as per the flight schedule they see (fly next day), passenger has to make arrangements, to stay at the airport or return to come back next day, to board the flight.
What is wrong with this service and how could it be made different”
- Airport personnel did not trust the passenger’s booking as correct. A big mistake and probably they did not have any means to verify it. Even then, instead of telling the passenger that the booking cannot be honored, they could have just assured the passenger that they will get to the bottom of this apparent anomaly in the booking to calm down the rising anxiety levels of the passenger.
- Passenger states that at the start of the journey the starting date of the trip got changed due to a technical failure that forced the airlines to cancel the flight that was boarded by the passenger, but the return flight details remained the same and e-ticket number remained the same. Airline would have had the audit of changes to the passenger’s booking that could have provided the insight to the airport personnel if it had made that available on encountering such anomalies.
- Airport personnel could have assured that if the booking changes were made by the airlines, passenger will not be penalized assuring the passengers that they are in good hands.
These are very simple changes if the airline had seen it from the passenger ‘s viewpoint and seen it as true to resort to sorting things from their end first.
I will continue this blog by taking another example of a service industry that introduced an immature product to its large customer base and not able to correct that mistake with simple corrective steps.