Any airline employees here? Check in!

[Turn CO Blue]

I work for a mid-sized low-cost carrier myself. I started out RON-ing aircraft, doing quick-turns in the day (that means 7 minutes to clean an entire plane between flights), then was a gate agent, then a baggage service agent, then I moved to Central Baggage and handled claims for a couple of years. I then started working with baggage performance data, then refund data, then the customer contact data and began to mine it and analyze it for ways to improve the customer experience.

I have always loved this industry -- it's too bad the pay is so bad and the fares have been driven so low by CONSOLIDATORS like Travelocity and Expedia and by the consumers that now fares are so low that MOST flights are losers money-wise. The airlines have been losing billions upon billions of dollars since 9/11 - and the bail-outs were good for maybe a year and those had to be paid back.

The oil industry has sure as shit never had to pay back any of their corporate welfare!!

Now all the airlines regularly lose money on MOST of their flights and it's a war of attrition between them to see who has the best cash position to wait out the demise of their competition in targeted markets so that they can possibly raise fares to a rate that will at least pay someone's salary or get some aircraft or buy some fuel.

I know that the kids who work at Quizno's down the street from me start out at $9.50 an hour and our gate agents start out at $8 something an hour. Worse, our Res agents start out at $7 something an hour. And that Quizno's kid can be trained in a few hours -- it takes a good six months for a gate agent to learn all of the rules and entries for boarding, baggage, security, loading, reprotection, etc. -- not to mention dealing with air-ragers in flip-flops who have more courtesy towards the kids at Taco Bell.

That kind of thinking - where safety and value and amenities mean nothing and PRICE is the only driver of the consumer's choices -- is what killed all the unions and decent wages in this beloved industry. It's killed the industry. Being a gate agent used to be a highly valued, competitive CAREER (not summer job) to have - anyone would be so proud. Now you have to be a masochist to want that job at $8.25 an hour!

See, the deal is -- consumers -- even DU'ers -- don't truly care about decent wages for airline employees whether they are liberal or conservative -- because they somehow how have the unreasonable belief that airfare across the US should cost about one day's wages. Of course, you can't reason with anyone that they couldn't even DRIVE the trip for that low of cost. There is a sense of entitlement that airline customers have that no other customer of any other service has. People think they have a RIGHT to $99 fares -- even though it takes some 20,000 processes and 400 people's daily jobs to arrange a flight and get a 750,000 pound aircraft of one million moving parts off the ground and landed safely in the next city on-time!

I get so angry whenever anyone does the me-too pile-on about how bad airlines and airline employees are -- there are 350,000 airline employees in the US -- that I can't even reason with anyone about it anymore. I hereby promise that I am going to do my best to ignore those threads, but you can bet that I am going to write a letter to Senator Boxer explaining the other side of the industry to her. She really needs to bother herself to interview a couple of hundred airline employees instead of just the passenger point-of-view.

We need an Airline Employee Bill of Rights at the same time anyone votes for a Passenger's Bill of Rights.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

1. I Understand Where You Are Coming From And I Sympathize. However, There Absolutely Has To Be A Way

to avoid keeping people on a plane for 11 hours; period.

I don't care what else is going on. I know what you're saying and I'm sure there are a lot of unsung heroes in the industry. But none of that should have anything to do with the legitimacy of Senator Boxer's proposal and the concept that going forward, there should never again be an issue with people getting stuck aboard a plane for 11 friggin hours. There is just no excuse for that in my opinion.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. Nobody should be stuck on an airplane for 11 hours,

but Boxer's proposal will be meaningless if it doesn't include airports and air traffic control, because airlines have little control over what happens on the ground in bad weather. If an airport's winter ops suck, there will be no way to get passengers off an airplane, no matter how desperately an airline wants to do it.

[Turn CO Blue]

6. TSA, ATC and airport authority have the control in that situation

The airline has no authority to decide whether they can or cannot offload customers if there is no gate available or if an airline makes an unscheduled stop that the ATC or airport authority does not wish to accommodate for whatever reason.

If those customers were stuck for 11 hours it was because the TSA (a branch of DHS) refused to let the airline offload the customers.

-- Barbara Boxer needs to learn a little bit about how the industry works!

[Solo_in_MD]

2. Fomer pilot at a now defunct carrier...I got out of the business

[Turn CO Blue]

10. I hope to get out some day - but it's like a black hole

it sucks you in and you can't imagine working in any other type of industry...

[Solo_in_MD]

12. I had no choice so I had to go outside. It was a rough transition emotionally

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. Count me in.

You can't even drive any considerable distance for under $100, and people complain about paying that much for a plane ticket -- apparently having no concept of the complexity and the cost and the enormous effort involved in getting that airplane safely from one place to the next. The industry is heavily regulated, and compliance, not to mention safety (which is the most important thing of all) is labor-intensive and expensive. Airline employees have been bearing the burden of increased fuel costs and unrealistically low ticket prices -- fuel goes up, pay gets cut; heaven forbid that ticket prices should be increased. I can't think of any other industry that doesn't pass increased operating costs on to its customers. It's the safest form of transportation on earth but nobody wants to pay what it really costs.

[The Straight Story]

4. Maybe Wal-Mart will start an airline....

That would be jacked up.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. You have to take into account the "race to the bottom" that is occurring

throughout the industry.

The bean counters claim that passengers value price above reliability, comfort, food, courteous employees, or anything else, although I suspect that it's a matter of projection. Since the bean counters themselves think of everything in monetary terms, they imagine that the entire population of the U.S. wants nothing more than the cheapest flight possible.

In order to provide the cheapest flight possible and still make money, the airlines start nickel and diming the passengers. One flight attendant for a major airline told me that it would no longer be possible for the coach passengers to have a twist of lemon or lime with their soft drinks, because some obsessive person in cost accounting had determined that the airline could save $45,000 a year that way.

The bean counters have narrowed the seats and crammed them closer together, taken away meals (which were decreasing in quality almost by the week) on domestic flights, even flights to Hawaii, and cut down on cleaning.

Given the constant increase in unpleasantness, as flying has turned from a relatively comfortable adventure into a nerve-wracking ordeal, who can blame passengers for seeking the lowest possible price? If it's possible for me to pay anywhere between $2000 and $200 for the same 17" wide seat with 31" pitch, 8 ounces of a soft drink, and a bag containing four pretzels, depending on what day or even what hour I make the reservation, I'm going to go for the lowest price. I'd be an idiot not to, since paying more doesn't bring me any more comfort or goodies--except the remote possibility of an upgrade if I'm an elite.

It's an absurd system, something only a bean counter could love. What restaurant would stay in business if it offered the same meal at up to 10 times its lowest price, depending on how far in advance the customer had made a reservation?

Yet some European airlines have had success with Premium Economy sections on overseas flights--a class between coach and business for perhaps $500 more than coach on a transatlantic flight. Those of us who have earned status on United have done so largely because it qualifies us for Economy Plus, which is not a true Premium section, since all you get is more seat pitch, although that's a major consideration

I know that airline employees do not have it easy. Both employees and passengers are screwed over by the executives, especially the bean counters.

I've mentioned this on another thread, but I wish all airline executives (especially the bean counters) could be required to make a long-haul roundtrip flight in coach every week: ORD<>HKG one week, JFK <> JNB the next week, and then SFO <>LHR the third week. I bet we'd see some improvements in coach after a month or so.

[Turn CO Blue]

9. Of course you raise good points

which only proves to demonstrate how complex this industry is.

Believe me, the average agent moans about the bean-counters more than you can imagine. But the thing is that fuel was up to $70 a barrel and capacity was high and there is a lot of competition in markets - with certain carriers engaging in some very irrational pricing gambits to prey on other carriers. And, after 9/11 we were hemorrhaging money! I remember that United was losing one million dollars per day. And you have to keep selling your seats at cheaper and cheaper fares just enough people onboard so you can get enough cash in fist to make payroll each month.

What other industry has all those processes I alluded to in the OP to accomplish -- yet has their agents working in the oldest, most arcane computer systems that you could imagine? These systems were written in the 50's and the GUI overlays aren't very good so the process is much like it was 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. We still use the same check-in lingo as agents did way back when, because the entry hasn't really changed. I bet you know what a TAR is!

The lack of automated processes and technological infrastructure is astounding. We need to triple the number of people in our IT department just to work on the outstanding projects, much less any new projects. I feel that the bean-counters are penny-wise, pound foolish by not getting better technology.

Your point about the restaurant business is well-taken, but do restaurants have people insisting that they not admit people with kids? No one would take the time to write that kind of letter to a restaurant, I think. Yet we have people writing in letters saying that we should not carry infants or obese people. What kind of heartless person would think that, much less write it? But we get letters like that by the dozens every month! We still get letters from customers (men) complaining about why the "stewardesses" aren't as young and blonde and thin as they were in the 70's.

There is something particularly obscene about the behavior and attitude of some people in this world. Mean people suck.


TCB

[countmyvote4real]

8. Flying just sucks these days. It's not worth it.

I'm not an airline employee, but I appreciate your position. Thanks for the insight, but it can't motivate what I can't pay for or want to endure.

There is no more glamor in air travel. By that I mean that paying customors are no longer presumbed to that or a "guest." We are all potential terrorists. I just don't want to fly anymore. And that's not taking into account the expediency of the medium that has been lost in 2 hour check-ins.

If I need to get to some place, I'll gladly take a bus or a train (while they last.)

[Skittles]

11. not me but I just want to say thank you

I guess I'm one of those rare people who is simply awed by what the airline industry does - it amazes me it works as often as it does - yes INDEED!