Airlines Want Premium PricesSo Why Is Customer Service Getting Worse?

There was a time when, faced with a passenger horror story about airline customer service, I’d generally take the side of the customer service agent. I’ve worked in that role, and you see an awful lot in a short time. I also worked in customer relations (and reservations) for a few airlines, where we’d listen to or read passenger complaints after the fact, and read reports from employees involved, trying to untangle where in the middle the actual truth was.

Both airline passengers and the employees who serve them are human, and there can be mistakes and miscommunications on both sides. Expertise, however, lies on the side of the worker-it’s their job, and they simply have more experience than even the most frequent fliers, facing the same aircraft and variations of the same passenger problems every day they come to work, while passengers themselves-even if they fly very frequently-have at best episodic experience with how airlines work.

But lately, I’ve noticed a change, both in the workers and the systems that airlines have in place for customer service. It’s particularly telling that, as airlines look for ways to extract more money from premium travelers by focusing on premium seating options, premium lounges, and premium credit cards, their customer service seems to continue its slow march in the opposite direction-rather akin to slapping a Whole Foods label on a bag of Walmart lettuce.

I was flying Alaska Airlines from Dallas to San Jose, California, via San Diego recently. I had a nearly five-hour layover in San Diego I wasn’t looking forward to, but when I deplaned in San Diego, I noticed that the very aircraft I had come in on was continuing to San Francisco just over an hour later. I’d forgotten exactly what the policy was (it varies by carrier), but generally speaking, airlines consider the three Bay Area airports (San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland) to be the same point, called a co-terminal, and allow flight changes between them.

I approached an Alaska representative at the gate podium and explained I was booked on the much later San Jose flight, but asked if I could get on the San Francisco flight for my convenience. An airport CSA would typically check the reservation, then should be able to quote a policy from memory. This particular agent didn’t look at my reservation, saying only that she didn’t know the answer and I should call reservations. Ok, weird, but no problem, I thought. I’ll call Alaska Airlines reservations, which is usually pretty straightforward, since you get an agent in Phoenix or Boise or Seattle who’s on the ball.

I got an agent in Phoenix who also did not look at my reservation and started quoting random policies. “You have to reprice the whole ticket from the beginning,” she said. I disagreed. Airlines use a different procedure for passengers who are in the middle of travel. After the agent got confused about where I was (San Diego), whether I had taken my first flight (I had), and what I wanted to do with my ticket, she finally looked at the reservation, said she could grab the flight but couldn’t ticket it, and I’d have to speak to someone in Pricing “to find out the cost.” Long story short, she connected me to an agent in Boise who found it strange that the airport agent in San Diego couldn’t help me, but fixed everything up and booked me for the San Francisco flight.

When I later called Alaska customer relations, they apologized and said they weren’t sure why the airport agent in San Diego said she couldn’t help me either.

That wasn’t an isolated incident. Airlines increasingly direct passengers who need help to online FAQs or chatbots, frustrating veteran fliers who know they need to speak to a live human. And when we get one, that’s not always effective either. Workers misquote policies or get confused about who they’re speaking with. Earlier this year, I waited on a chat hold to speak with an American Airlines supervisor, only to get one on the line believing they were speaking to an entirely different customer and being very forceful in their refusals until I explained I wasn’t who they thought they were chatting with.

My personal pet peeve is when I’ve had an issue and need to call an airline’s reservations line, and they waste a good deal of my time telling me how convenient it is to access their website for help instead (as though the fact that an airline has a website is a hot news tip for myself and every other caller). They get bonus points for spelling out the website excruciatingly slowly, as though anybody who needs the URL spelled out for them is going to be of any help to themselves on their website in the first place.

Then I invariably get connected to the cheery automated chatbot voice, who can struggle through collecting my record locator and helpfully respond, “Your…reservation…is…reservation. Press one to hear this information again. Press two for ticket counter hours and locations. Press three to hear our privacy policy. Goodbye!”

Airlines also seem to be good at punishing passengers for their own shortcomings.

Following several well-publicized stowaway incidents, Delta has set out to reduce crowding around boarding doors by requiring passengers to wait in line until an agent calls them forward in an airport version of the “Mother May I” children’s game. Airline passengers don’t seem to play this game very well, resulting in repeated overhead admonishments from agents not to approach them until called.

That’s not to say it’s the agents’ fault. They’re just reacting to management’s well-meaning but flawed approach, haven’t received enough training (it’s expensive to pay workers to learn about their jobs instead of doing them), or are stretched across more flights and functions than is reasonable.

Now, when friends and acquaintances look to swap battle stories about bad travel experiences, and they seek to blame airlines, they find in me a more willing commiserator.

On a Delta flight from Atlanta to Dallas over the weekend, we waited several minutes after the boarding door closed on an already-delayed late evening flight. After some time, the pilot came on the PA and explained that the gate agent had pulled the jet bridge off the aircraft, but not far enough for it to safely push back from the gate, so we were delayed while the pilot called operations to find the agent to have them come pull the jet bridge back further. He came back twenty minutes later, saying that they were still trying to find someone who was qualified to operate the jet bridge to move it the extra few feet.

Delta’s procedures are clearly different than the airlines I worked for, where gate agents were required to wait on the jet bridge until the aircraft pushed back, so the pilots could hand signal to the agent or tell the ramp agents via radio they needed the jet bridge removed or replaced. I can only surmise it was Delta’s rush to have the agent clock out or move onto another flight that took them away from the gate that evening. The jet bridge was eventually moved, and our flight departed nearly an hour late, and roughly 40 minutes after the doors had closed.

“Well,” said the flight attendant in our part of the cabin. “All you can do is laugh.”

None of us sitting around her took up the suggestion.