What Airlines Don’t Get About Passenger Experience

By Robert McGarvey

The headline in a Phocuswire piece caught my eye: “WHY SMART AIRLINES WILL FIND VALUE IN PRIORITIZING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.”

Put aside the obvious jab that airlines and smart is an oxymoron rather like a kindly sadist – the terms just don’t go together.

However, I also don’t think airlines and customer experience belong in the same sentence, at least not when there is the suggestion that they care about our experience.

Exhibit A in my case that they don’t care is a Wapo story I’d read the day before: “Self-serve snack bars are coming to a flight near you” proclaimed that headline. 

The pettiness is in the details. The Wapo piece reported that United is initiating self-service snack kiosks on some flights out of O’Hare.  In doing this United joins The JetBlue Pantry which is available on some flights.

At the United kiosk coach passengers will be able to gorge on a veritable groaning board of delicacies consisting of a “limited supply of water and the snacks offered during the complimentary service,” said United.

Wapo elaborated that the feast would include “items like fruit bars from That’s It, Undercover chocolate quinoa crisps and Savory snack mix.”

Time for a sanity check: would you give a hoot about any of this?  Would you walk down the aisle to grab your share?

I won’t.

Let us say you are on a long flight in coach – cross country, say.  You anticipate being hungry at the four hour mark.  Would you not have bought a sandwich at an airport restaurant or maybe brought some personal favorite snacks from your favorite market?  I know I would.  

For years I have had a thou shall not eat airline comestibles policy – except on international flights (where I eat out of boredom). It’s a good rule, I commend it to you and if you do need to eat inflight bring your own grub.

Back at Phocuswire, a thesis of that piece is “Any airline working to recover passenger volumes, regain loyalty with millennials and engage Gen Z – who are fast becoming the dominant market – must be seen to be improving the customer experience for their passengers.”

We Boomers apparently have been cowed into docility by a quarter century of airline penny pinching. The young ones who increasingly are doing the bulk of travel demand better. Good on them.

Marketer Matthew Walker, the author of the PhocusWire piece, goes on: “What happens when a generation whose retailing experiences have been shaped by on-demand services, no-questions-asked refunds and same-day delivery encounters an industry that has historically never met those expectations, but now in recovery is struggling more than ever?”

Let me suggest to airline execs that Gen Z are not going to be wowed by a sampling of mediocre, leftover snacks and if those execs are hoping that this ploy will persuade passengers to become loyal, well, that is fantasy.

A generation won’t be bribed by a free snack.

What would persuade flyers to evidence loyalty to a carrier? Fewer flight cancellations and delays, to start.  More free perks such as baggage check.  No cost flight rescheduling by the passenger.  Credible and stable awards programs. These are things that matter. (And, yeah, Southwest already has two of the four handled but it definitely struggles with the first and it’s devaluing its miles come January.)

A snack doesn’t matter. What, it saves me a couple bucks!

Trend research says that what we want in travel today are experiences – but that really means good experiences.  Airlines today, at their best, seem to provide just the minimum and if there are no failures we strike it up as a success.

But we don’t like it, not a bit. We suffer it.

We fly because there is no genuine alternative for many of the trips we take.

In Europe, yes, there are growing options for train travel and I have been quite satisfied with my trips on the rails there.

But in the US our only choice often is to fly.

It’s not a good choice.  But when it’s the only choice we take it.

Just don’t think a small bag of pretzels will buy my affection.