Airlines Need to Get Sneaky
Lately, I fly a lot. I feel like I’m flying Jeff Pulver levels of a lot. And this has me thinking. Airlines: most of everything you do inside the plane needs reconsidering. Here’s my advice.
- Amtrak has somehow managed to figure out how to give me power for my laptop. Please, can you try? Add the expense on as a surcharge. (You’ll hear that last part a lot in this post).
- Don’t charge me for soda pop or cheese snacks. Just add $6 to my ticket, to everyone’s ticket, and give it to me. That’ll cut down in money fumbling time.
- This in-flight ad bull has to stop. I’m captive, but if you float down a television, do not pummel me with stupid ads, *or* if you’re going to do ads, do them about destinations, so that we learn something useful while accidentally receiving marketing.
- Please adjust flight attendant training for smart phones. If I turn off the phone part of my phone, I can still use the apps without risking the plane’s safety. Don’t have your attendants poking at me to shut it off just because it can also be a phone.
- Is there any way we can fix that “get off the plane” part of my trip? The amount of time between that bell ding and actually walking by the pilots to thank them for a non-bumpy landing seems to last forever. Isn’t there any kind of Disney people-in-line engineering that would fix this process? Tazers for slow people? At this point, I’d pay an extra 10 bucks for you to restrain people so I can just leave efficiently.
- Take the lead of airlines like Southwest and others (most recently, the flight attendant from Mesa Air) and really have fun with those pre-flight announcements. This guy had us all laughing and cheering all the way through his “in the event of an emergency, the floor lighting will be illuminated” speech. Laughing like you’d pay money laughing, I’m saying. Can you just try to liven that part up? We’d listen more intently.
- If the flight is a red-eye (like half my flights from the west coast to the east), could you not come on every few seconds to update us on things like our altitude, on our beverage choices, on your offers of rewards cards and the like? We pretty much know the beverage choices. I mean, you’re not making smoothies, are you? Shush and let us poor bastards sleep.
Okay, I’ve griped enough. Now it’s your turn. What else would you want to tell an airline about the travel process?
And what does this have to do with social media? Simple: I have a voice. I have a community. I have reach. ALL companies have to think about that. We are not silent. We are not complacent. We intend to influence.
The world is two-way.
Agree?
Photo credit, Aaron Escobar
Thank You Continental Airlines
I promise that this is NOT a bitch and moan session about some horrible disservice done to me by Continental. In fact, I sincerely mean “thank you.” You see, Continental Airlines did something for me that I’ve never experienced before.
They called me.
On my flight back from San Francisco en route to Boston, I had a connecting flight in New Jersey. Because PodCamp NYC was happening, I decided to hop off in Newark and trek down to Brooklyn for the event. This choice brought with it an issue.
I had 3 bags. Rules say I can only carry two on the plane. When I asked the counter agents, they said I could change my ticket, but that would cost about $100. So, it would effectively cost me $100 to move a bag from San Francisco to New Jersey. What to do? So, I made the decision to check the least scary to lose of all my bags, with about 300 labels on it showing that it was mine and how to reach me. And I got off in Jersey, with that lonely little bag flying without me to Boston.
Flash forward to Saturday morning, and my phone rings. It’s Ellen from Continental’s baggage department. She’s very politely telling me that I seem to have left a bag behind. She’s very friendly. I tell her what I did, what the agents said. She was VERY kind, very understanding, even apologetic that it seemed silly to me about the $100 option.
I haven’t flown Continental in a while, and I’m not sure when I will again. But I wanted you to know that they were nice, that they called ME, and that I appreciated that human touch.
File this under “good guys get blogged, too.”
