Motivate your flight attendents to improve customer experience

I even had terrible service on Southwest recently! They used to seat parents with small children ahead of "group A" but suddenly changed this policy (literally between when I flew out and when I flew back). On my return trip all of the parents with small children were HERDED to the very back of the plane -- this didn't do anything for the rest of the passengers. A bunch of small children packed together in the bumpiest part of the plane caused a domino effect of crying and screaming. Made me swear off of ever flying Southwest again

Wow, I wonder if that's a new company-wide policy or if was just that particular crew expiramenting? I might do a little research on that as it sounds like a really bad idea. Not only do you have that domino effect of crying, but you end up keeping the kids and babies on the plane longer as the back of the plane is the last to get off.

The explanation I was given was that they were reserving the "block" of seats at the back of the plan for families in order to insure that families were able to sit together. This was, of course, not a problem when they allowed families to board first. But perhaps the "A" boarding customers complained that families always managed to snag the first few rows...

Ah, I see. So families have lost early boarding privileges and now have to huddle at the back of the plane. Boo on SW for that one.

Its a real shame because I fly a lot and unfortunately outside of Southwest and Virgin America, airlines in the USA have the worse customer services I experience in the world. Until you fly on Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific, SAS, a lot of Americans really don't know what they're missing out on. In fact, if most American people flew on any of these airlines, you would start to boycott the major USA airlines until they get their act together.

Bad customer service is really unacceptable...and the beauty about America is that you have so much choice!!!! Vote with your wallets and watch the airlines improve or get pushed out of the market.

True customer service comes within. You have to have the right personality to perform these types of roles. If you don't have the personality, then you shouldn't be in the role. It's real simple.

All very true!

How can we get somene from UAL's customer service (if there is such a thing there) to respond?

I think the probabilities are about the same as "Pan Am" topping Singapore Airlines as the premier airline in the world ;-)

Get Satisfaction should actively recruit the executive admins for corporate CEOs to sign-up for accounts and start to monitor their companies' threads. Maybe GS should just have a feature called "I'm the boss" that will daily email the hottest threads for a given company out to the CEO or President so that they can keep an eye on what is most pressing about their company.

agree there should be a way to motivate this. The flight attendants are unionized so there may be complexity there.

Service consistency is key. On United sometimes i get amazingly great service. Other times it really is disappointing. The lack of consistency creates real problems.