Usairways.com Sets Record

[longing4piedmont]

Humm. How did I miss these two topics? They are my favorites. So let me begin by giving you a little background. I’m a CP on US, a PLT on DL and hold status on a couple of other airlines. I will fly this year close to 300 segments on somebody with a little over half going to US. I book my tickets on line and never, ever use a kiosk unless forced to.

Let’s take the web site first.

I book all my flights on the web. Why? I like to be able to see my options and the pricing of those options. With that said, US has the worst web site of any airline I book on. It is hard to use, often “errorsâ€￾ out before finishing the booking, and most of its limited functions do not work as they are supposed to. Now I will say that over the last month of so, e-commerce has managed to eliminate most of the bugs.

I started back in the early spring working with e-commerce on the bug issues. I would book a flight, using the web as intended, and just about every week something would go wrong. I would then email all the paper trail to e-commerce for them to track the issues. For a long time the back button would not work, the upgrade function never worked, the web-checking function was always a problem, etc, etc, etc. When I would call the CP desk, I would be directed to web support and then the web support people would blame the CP desk.

The web support team is worthless. The only way I could even get anyone to work on the issue at hand was to get a supervisor on the phone (every time being told none was available) and then using a name from e-commerce to coerce them into dealing with the problem. Sad, but very true.

The CP desk then would have to clean up the mess. I can not tell you how many times the agent on the desk would tell me they hear it all the time and have to deal with it everyday. The folks on the desk know what the issues are with the web site better than any one else. They feel like no one listens to them and have told me time after time after time that they have tried to get management to listen to them about these issues. So for all the management who lurks here, please talk to folks on the desk. You are sitting on a gold mine of information and you are not using it.

And for those of who are on the CP desk. You are the best. You are the main reason I have stayed with US over the past couple of years. I know many others who feel the same way. You see any airline can get you from point A to point B when the sun is shining. But to me the true test is when things wrong; a mechanical, a hurricane, etc. That is when you shine. I always know that who ever picks up the phone on the other end is going to move heaven and earth to get me where I need to go. I never thought much of Wolf, but this is one thing he got right. If the day ever comes that US does away with the desk, I will be gone the next. You are the best and you generate more revenue by just being there than this management team will ever know. I hope you all enjoyed the treats the other night.

Many of the web site heavy users have volunteered their time to e-commerce to work with them on the new web site, put it through the paces and help point out the bugs or suggest changes. Several of these volunteers work in the IT field. I am sorry to say, no one who has offered to help has been contacted by e-commerce that I know of.

Let’s do the kiosk in part two…….

 

[longing4piedmont]

Ah, those wonderful little kiosk. I’ve had this conversation with a couple of members of senior management.

To me, these little joys are the biggest single threat to the image of all airlines. As mentioned before, they work great when all you want to do is check in. But let something go wrong and they can’t handle it. The average person out there does not know how to use them for something simple like check in, how can we possibly think they can use it to re-route a ticket? What good does it do to have an agent at every machine showing them how to use it? Is Ma Kettle going to remember how two years from now the next time she flies?

You have to have agents at the airport and staffed at level to handle problems. Period. A machine can’t do it. A month or so ago when flying DL, I arrived at ATL at 11:00 PM after a long six hour flight from GSO. I needed a hotel voucher from DL since it was their fault for the misconnect. There had also been a thunderstorm roll through earlier in the evening and the place was packed. In two terminals, I could find two agents that could handle this issue. The line was over fifty people long and after ten minutes and no movement, I just gave up and went and got my own hotel room. BTW, DL has another wonderful invention called a telephone that several agents tried to force me to called DL Direct. I didn’t need to talk to some one on the phone; I needed a voucher which can only be issued by a human.

So for those in management; I will not use a kiosk. I know that in the end this is one fight I'm going to lose, but I can see the cancer growing and I’m not going to support it.