Warbird Information Exchange

I have a small amount of stock in Delta airlines.
I was looking up news of it on the financial site, and there are several very strong complaints about Delta, particularly their bad service and unfriendly treatment of passengers.

It is said that the flight attendants ignore passenger requests and are rude in general.
One man thinks it is because the attendants have their union behind them, and thus don't think they might be fired or need to do a good job. It sounds like that may have some truth. Several others say they feel the some gay attendants are rude toward straight passengers, don't know if that has much truth.

One man was delayed for hours due to weather, and he went to the Delta club. He did not have his membership card with him, but ask them to look him up on the computer. In spite of the record that showed that he was a Gold member, Delta refused to admit him to the club unless he paid a $50 fee. Just outside near the door Delta was selling new memberships,so the man went to them and explained his problem. Those people said the club should let him in, even went to the club door with and still no entry. The club people just wanted the $50 fee. I wonder if they were just rude for no reason or if they get a commission on each fee they collect?

I have never understood why anyone who is doing a job would not try to do it right and it least try to treat people in a friendly way. Beside pride in your work and your company, it would seem employees are likely to have stock in their airline and thus profit if the airline does.

Treatment like this sure makes many new customers for Southwest which I also have stock in. I wish their stock was doing as well as their service.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

I think you'll find similar complaints at any of the current airlines. Certainly, your favorite SWA has had it's fair share of high profile customer service complaints (like film director Kevin Smith's multiple run-ins), too.

I think that this is simply a sign of the times, both in terms of the economy as well as the attitude of the flying public;

- Customers haven't started to vote on this with their wallets yet, they're still buying tickets primarily based on cost. This means that they don't yet care enough about level of service for it to make a difference to an airline's bottom line. Once that starts becoming a factor, then management will demand cabin crew maintain a higher/nicer standard of service. Personally, I wish at least ONE domestic airline would make the basis of their PR campaign "we have experienced well-paid pilots to get you safely to your destination, and we have happy, well-trained FAs who will make your trip easy and pleasant," and then BACK IT UP with some actual action.

- Customers are pretty darn rude themselves; I'm constantly floored by some of the phenomenally crude and rude attitudes and behavior by passengers, and I can only imagine how challenging it must be for cabin crew to tolerate these morons and their attitudes/actions day in and day out. I don't know that I could maintain a chipper-chicken attitude constantly, either.

Here's a post from one of the airline forums about JetBlue's service from cabin crew...doesn't sound much different than what you have observed at a legacy carrier, despite what is said below:

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This. Cost matters more to corporate travel departments than customer service. It matters more to families than customer service too. So the low cost airline is almost always the first choice.

On the other hand, I've always found FA's, gate personnel, and other airline employees to be very reasonable given the clueless, boorish, and otherwise horrible behavior exhibited by many passengers.

Just FYI Bill, the flight attendants, like nearly all the employee groups at Delta, are not unionized--doesn't excuse any bad attitudes, though.....

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Rod Schneider
Ball Ground, Ga

Rod, I don't know anything about the Delta union myself; rather I thought that it was one of the customers complaining on the Yahoo financial site under Delta.
I went back to the site to read it again and could not find that comment. It is possible that I didn't read it accurately.

There is no doubt that there were several complaints of the same type about bad or rude service.

I myself almost never fly on Delta here in Colorado.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

I think you'll find that with all airlines, all restaurants, all hotels, etc. Unhappy customers are much more likely to post than happy customers.

Also, consider this - how many of these complaints are about "Delta" employees whom are actually "Northwest" employees. Northwest had near the end a very bad reputation (I personally never had a good experience with them neither did my dad who at the time was flying 2-3 times a week and this was from a period of 1990-2004) not only in customer service not being at all friendly, but also the corporation having generally poor customer service policies to the point that they had one of the worst lost baggage rates of the airlines and had this annoying habit of getting the luggage they didn't lose to the destination without the passengers (because the bags would make the connection from a delayed flight but the passengers wouldn't). As well, they didn't do a good job of taking care of those stranded passengers. I got stranded twice by NWA in a half dozen flights with them over 4 years and both times had to ASK for the airline's compensation package and even then didn't get it all without having to ask for each item that was in the package individually. Both times I ended up switching to another airline to get home the next morning because all of the flights out were overbooked (and this was from MSP!). My dad had this happen even more often. Working with them "ramp side" didn't improve my personal view of the airline either. Nothing "unsafe" per-se, but their employees at Denver were even more "sourpuss" than the American Airlines guys who were almost as bad as the ex-TWA American Airlines guys, and that's saying something because the AMR crew was not a very likable bunch at Denver.

For an accurate assessment of customer complaints, one only needs to go to the official DOT website. Here, every statistic is compiled, analyzed and ranked:

http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/reports/index.htm

From here, go to year 2010, once there go to this link:'

http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/reports/ ... erATCR.PDF

Within this PDF file, go to page 40, table 6.

Is it mere coincidence that the two airlines we are talking about in this thread have ranked first and last?

Warbird I ,thanks for the info.

I didn't know that my experience was the same as others, but there it is in the govt figures in black and white.

Southwest ranks the best, #1 for least complaints per passenger, Delta ranks the worst. It is easy to compare the two because for Nov 2010, after the Delta merger with Northwest, both SW and Delta are about the same size., about 9,700,00

With about the same number of passengers, SW had 21 total passenger complaints. Delta had 157 just in that one month of Sept. The rate is .22 per 100,000 for SW and 1.86 for Delta so, Delta has 8 times as many complaints per passenger as SW.

Now maybe Delta operates in the N E where the weather is worse, but SW also flys to some Eastern areas too, they aren't just all Dallas to Austin or Houston. Maybe it is some problems from the merger,and maybe the Yankee passengers just like to gripe more. But mostly I think SW does a good job compared to all the other airlines, and Delta has a real problem.

What surprised me about the complaints re Delta is that I saw them on a financial site, not just a consumer site.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

No problem, Bill, glad I could help. When it comes to subjective things like "perceived service", you must look at what the vast majority of people report, not just anecdotal hearsay evidence. I think the DOT website is a valid tool to compare any particular airline's service vs. another, IMO.

One thing to remember with Delta is that it has a much more complex hub and spoke system. Try taking SW to London, Tokyo, or Buenos Ares. That bigger system and all of the interfaces within the system create a much larger opportunity for problems with luggage, weather, etc. And what passenger isn't more cranky after an 8 hour flight following a connecting flight than the two hour legs you're likely to experience on SW? They are different beasts...

True to some extent, but Delta doesn't live and die by 30 minute turns either like Southwest does. Most of its flights have 45-60 minute turn-arounds and so if a plane is 5 minutes late, it's not a big deal, the turn is now 40-55 minutes. With SWA, if a flight is late, EVERYTHING is late down the line unless the crew can make time up in the air and people are more likely to miss flights because SWA can't hold every flight for every connecting passenger and (again) with the tighter turn schedule, it's more likely for a connection to be missed. So the fact that the same volume people aren't complaining nearly as much means that either SWA isn't creating reasons for complaints, or if they are, they are handling the situation much better than others.

Overall this world has become so disrespectful. When a flight is cancelled now people take it offensive as if it was directed towards them. Overall dont be an idiot and book a flight during the winter. That would overall fix the problem with people being pissy.

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Shop the Airplane Bunker At
www.warbirdbunker.com

So true! I remember one time when I diverted my aircraft due to heavy thunderstorms shutting down the field to our destination. I safely diverted to an alternate about 30 minutes from our original destination. It doesn't matter how much you explain, or try to justify your actions on the basis of safety, there will always be someone who is pissed off for no good reason. I remember this one customer on that flight who was extremely irate at me because I didn't land at our original destination. He told me, "I expect to land there ON TIME and not anywhere else." I said, "I expect to land there alive, no matter how long it takes." He shook his head in disgust and walked away. If I wasn't in uniform, I would have chewed his ass with severe, harsh words. Discretion got the better part of me and I let it go.

That's why airports have security officers or cops... they get to chew the irate passenger out as they put him in handcuffs for assault.