During flights, airline passengers usually go for the dramatics and complain about anything. This is more so with large airlines than they do about discount airlines. Amazingly, they complain even when the actual quality of the airlines' performances is similar. This is according to new paper by the federal government examining travellers' complaints for over a decade.
The reason: The Deltas and Uniteds of the airline industry carry a higher percentage of business travelers, who of course pay higher fares and they naturally expect better service in return.
Smaller airlines such as Alaska (ALK), Southwest (LUV), and JetBlue Airways (JBLU) catch a break from the public because majority of who they serve are leisure travellers.
These people also most likely do not know much about a thing such as the U.S. Department of Transportation's Aviation Consumer Protection Division.
A graduate student named Mike Wittman at MIT's International Center for Air Transportation who also compiled the data from 2002 to 2012 said, "When I first started this, I had no idea it was possible to make a complaint to the government about a service failure."
His paper (PDF) was published the month before in the Journal of Air Transport Management.
The Federal Transportation officials compile travelers' complaints and they issue a detailed monthly report on service quality. The office also accepts compliments for airlines. November last year, travelers submitted 755 complaints.
Another reason why budget airlines like Southwest and JetBlue do better when it comes to angry customers: happier employees. Wittman said, "A friendly smile or a sympathetic reaction at the point of service failure may go a long way towards moderating complaint rates at low-cost carriers". These smiles tend to diffuse the hot heads of the customers enough that any flight problem might cause.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
