Customer Service and low cost airlines
I recently got to experience two very different customer service events at two different low cost airlines. The first with Southwest the second with Air Tran.
The first involved a flight from San Jose to Los Angeles. When I first booked the flight it was SJC to LAX late in the evening. Within a day or two I had to change the flight. Since this was a fully refundable ticket I didn’t have any fee but I may have confused the agent when I said I would like to change my flight from number X to number Y. The agent said that he couldn’t find any flights by that number from SJC to LAX and I agreed that made sence since the flight I wanted to change to was from SJC to SNA but didn’t want to change anything else. The agent then said no problem. However when I got to SJC the kiosk couldn’t find my reservation so I headed to the ticket counter while booting my laptop to find the confirmation email. When I opened the two copies of the email I found that the second (for the new flight) had changed the date to the day I called rather than retaining the original date. The agent at the desk took a look and then started typing. Shortly there after as I was diging out a credit card in expectation of a fee she handed me a boarding pass and said thanks for flying Southwest. I’ve since heard from others that this sort of no question no problem solution is characteristic of Southwest
The second event involved AirTran on a flight from BWI to BOS. I arrived at the airport at 5pm for a 9pm departure hoping to stand by for either the 5:30, the 6:30, or the 7:30. I was unable to figure out how to get the kiosk to do a standby. When I found a person I was told I had to check in via kiosk before talking to anyone. Once I checked in I was told that since there were in a ground hold due to weather the couldn’t do a standby but that the gate could. The gate couldn’t because of the delays (the 4:30 hadn’t left yet) and sent me to customer service. Customer service was able to but said the chances weren’t good. At the end of a long evening I made it onto the 7:30 which left at 9:30. The notible customer service event was that over the course of the evening the number of agents in the terminal kept dropping. By about 8:30 there was a maintenance guy in reflective vest (possibly a supervisor) as the only person at the customer service desk and a gate agent supervior running both the gate for the 7:30 and 9pm flights to Boston. He was absolutely amazing (to the point that I wrote a compliment to the airline) but it was sort of odd that there was no one there to help him.
I should note that while AirTran and JetBlue seem to aim for the same staffing (one agent per active gate) at JetBlue the flight attendants staff the desk when the show up and know enough of the system to change seating assignments and do stand by boarding passes. AirTran seems to leave the single agent there along.
All that said I would still fly AirTran for sort non-stop flights on the east coast but choose just about anyone else first. Bottom line AirTran isn’t as bad as USAir but I wouldn’t trust them to not loose my luggage if I ever checked any.