Yes some airfare search boxes jump a month ahead, or default to two weeks for lowest fares, or put the default travel date in for tomorrow. But after all that you STILL have have multiple chances to review your flights, times, pax name, airports, and dates. You seriously didn’t read your outbound and return dates BEFORE entering your CC, email, and confirming?

Also if CEO Sean Menke picked up the phone every time a customer, vendor, potential pilot, wife, girlfriend or toner cartridge salesman wanted to rap with him he’d have to time facilitate whatever it takes to run an airline. I’ve had a few flavors of ice cream in mind myself but I don’t expect Ben or Jerry to have time to listen to my ideas for glazing waffle cone chunks.

And yes the “It’s your fault” is a rapid, clear-cut, instinctive answer — because it’s true.

Yeah I do have customers and I do serve them with greater regard and attention than most airlines. There are rare occasions when an airline surprises, but it’s a surprise because it’s so rare.

Merry Christmas. Come back again! I swear that if I wrote just one airline post a week my traffic stats would be through the roof, these are consistently high performers for me. All hail Google, 38% of my traffic comes from search engines thanks to posts like this, two months old and still getting commented on.

It’s awfully presumptuous of you to suggest otherwise.

I think this is because, obviously, search engines pick these up and with my pagerank being what it is, I make it in the search index. Having said that, I also think it is due to airlines employing a pretty aggressive counter critic strategy.

The disappointing thing about the reflexive “dude it’s your fault” comments is that they miss two concrete things that Frontier could do to improve their customer experience, if they are really interested in that. The first is to look into what is happening on their website when customers are using Safari, I made another reservation recently and noticed the same behavior, the month jumps one forward for the return flight when you select your departure date. This isn’t a subjective complaint, this reflects something that could be improved on the website.

Secondly, put some frickin hold music on the customer service number to let customers know they are still connected. The customer service agent trying to charge me more than a new ticket would cost is another thing altogether, but I don’t think a high IQ is a requirement for that job so I’ll just leave it be.

Lastly, I have gotten consistently good results by going to the CEO. The reason is simple, a CEO just delegates a problem to someone on his staff with a “fix this” directive. Things get done this way, like when we had problems with our washing machine and the CEO of Maytag dispatched a service technician with a truck full of parts and orders to fix it in one day, after nearly 6 weeks of fighting with the service center about sending out techs without parts. And Maytag gave me a 3 year extended warranty at no charge… one voicemail to the CEO of Maytag. Just a few months ago I dispatched a letter to the President of Shell America about some crappy service I had at a filling station… I received a letter from the station owner and a $100 gift card in the mail a few weeks ago.

So, Colin, you won’t win any argument with me about going to the CEO or writing about my experiences in this blog as ineffective because I have literally dozens of personal experiences where I’ve cut through the crap and gotten more than I asked for by simply calling or writing a CEO.

You: ..all because of your stupid website, my flight was mis-booked and I demand that you change the flight for me, free of charge.
Customer service agent: (Thinking: this guy’s yelling about his own mistake…at me! There might be something I can do to save him some grief…but he’s causing me grief! F this guy. If only I wouldn’t risk losing my job by hanging up on this a-hole..) I’m sorry, sir: there’s nothing else I can do. There will be a $100 change fee for this.

Example 2 – you…enlightened:

You: Hi, I’m terribly sorry but I made a mistake in booking my reservation. I booked my flight to come back a little too early…I meant to come back the next day.
Customer service agent: (Thinking: oh, I feel bad for this guy! Simple mistake) Ok, sir: let’s see what we can do!
You: Oh, thank you so much..

See how much more pleasant that is?? Put yourself on the receiving end of any conversation. How would you want someone to talk to you? Being yelled at by some impatient a-hole for your company’s “Sanford-and-son” aircraft when it’s a slight (and rare) mechanical delay?

Seriously. Everyone should work in the retail and restaurant industries for a month each. You will appreciate wait staff and customer service on a whole new level. Yelling gets you no where.

Not saying you’re a mean person but when you let stress/frustration take over, you become a customer service person’s worst enemy. Do you like to jump in and cheerfully help your enemies? Neither do I.

That’s very frustrating but, as James above said, totally your fault. No company is going to list their CEO’s name in their corporate phone directory! “Oh, I’m pissed – I’m going straight to the top!” Come on, buddy – we’re all sorry for your terrible experience. But I’ll bet 100 other people – a thousand other people – had that same experience, said, “Silly me!” and laughed it off. You? You ruined your own day.

Lighten up!! You would have saved yourself a lot of grief by double-checking your reservation before submitting it.

I just made a rez today and would NEVER complete the process with knowing re-reading then confirmation page for the exact date (12/7) or whatever, that I was departing. – just in case I made the same calender error.

They owe you nothing – that’s your fault.

My question is this.. Why would an airline with such LOW Customer Satisfaction levels already, further submit unhappy customers looking for their Lost Luggage to a 3rd-rate outsourced call-center in India where English falls FAR from a second language. Call there sometime, if you can get anyone who speaks understandable english, go buy yourself a Lotto Ticket.

My apologies for my thoughts flying faster than my fingers.