"Um sorry ... Airlines take the apology game far more seriously"

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Um sorry ... Airlines take the apology game far more seriously
Complaints are on the increase, but so, too, are the mea culpas. One
airline, Southwest, even has a chief apologizer.
By Jeff Bailey
The New York (NY) Times


DALLAS - Airlines are getting serious about saying they're sorry.

After a spate of nightmarish service disruptions, American Airlines, JetBlue
Airways and others are sending out more apologies, hoping to head off
customer complaints and quell talk of new consumer-protection regulations
from Congress.

But no airline accepts blame quite like Southwest Airlines, which employs
Fred Taylor Jr. in a job that could be called chief apology officer.

His formal title is senior manager of proactive customer communications. But
Taylor -- 37, rail thin and mildly compulsive by his own admission -- spends
his 12-hour workdays finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers
and then firing off homespun letters of apology.

"Erring on the side of caution, our captain decided to return to Phoenix
rather than second-guess the smell that was in the cabin," Taylor wrote to
passengers who were on a March 7 flight to Albuquerque. A faulty valve was
to blame. "Not toxic, it was obviously annoying," he assured them, throwing
in a free voucher for future travel to clear the air.

The airline industry has more to apologize for these days. Delays and lost
baggage have been rising. Planes are more crowded. And airline workers, many
suffering two rounds of pay and benefit cuts in recent years, sometimes have
little sympathy left for customers.

Intense news coverage of the industry, meanwhile, means national attention
for a planeload of passengers stranded for hours on a tarmac: American
flights on Dec. 29, JetBlue on Feb. 14.

Now, rather than rely entirely on weary front-line workers, many airlines
are institutionalizing the apology. American said its apology letters were
running twice the level of a year ago. JetBlue now e-mails an apology within
36 hours of certain service failures. And Continental Airlines and US
Airways both say they are sending many more apology letters.

Apologizing is not particularly costly for airlines. Most airlines include
flight vouchers, ranging from $50 to two roundtrip tickets, along with
apologies for longer delays and other avoidable mishaps.

For Southwest, Taylor composes about 180 letters a year explaining what went
wrong on particular flights and, with about 110 passengers per flight, he
mails off about 20,000 mea culpas. Each one bears his direct phone line.

This year, he has already exceeded that total because Southwest sent written
apologies to 22,000 passengers who passed through a choked Las Vegas airport
on Feb. 19 and 20. (That letter listed a general customer service number.)

Such fiascos are rare. But even on good days, big airlines have plenty to be
sorry about: a tragicomic mix of broken planes, sick passengers, and scary
landings.

Taylor also writes an internal daily report at Southwest, used by others at
the airline to explain service failings. It is leavened with a comic touch
that his wife said made him the clown of their freshman college algebra
class.

Recapping a troubled flight from Las Vegas to San Jose, Calif., last April
18, for instance, he explained that the plane had circled back after takeoff
because the landing gear would not retract. And there was more.

"During the return, a customer became ill and apparently 'decorated' three
rows of seats -- and perhaps a few customers," he wrote. "No word on how
Linda Blair is doing."

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