Slow Learners

By now, most people in North America – if not in the Free World – have heard about United Airlines breaking guitars, outsourcing their customer service call centers to India, putting minors on the wrong airplane and similar stunts that get them mocked, flamed and reported on the evening news. Most of the errors themselves are nothing of consequence; any organization run by human is going to foul up sometimes, and even an error rate of .0001% is going to result in several dozen cases each week when the company handles several million transactions a day. And while the screw-ups have been bad for the company’s image – and therefore generally bad for business – none of them have really be catastrophic. Or at least, none of them had been until the airline lost an unaccompanied minor last month…

You can pick up the original AP story from the CBC News website if you want to, but the basic idea is that a family was sending their 10-year-old daughter from San Francisco to Traverse City, Michigan to attend summer camp. They paid the usual $99 “unaccompanied minor” fee to the airline, and in return United agreed to make sure the girl made it through the transfer at O’Hare. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. When the girl arrived in Chicago there was no one to meet her, and no one from United seemed to know anything about the situation. She asked to use the telephone to call her parents and tell them what had happened, but the airline people told her to sit down and wait, and they would handle it. Unfortunately, none of them actually did anything…

When the child failed to turn up in Traverse City the camp called the parents, who were understandably upset by this and started trying to get some word out of United. Her mother called the company’s main customer service line, which connected her with the call center in India, where (after a twenty-minute or so wait) a representative told her that her daughter had, in fact, arrived in Traverse City. On being told this was incorrect, the call center put her on hold for another ten minutes, and then repeated the (incorrect) reply that her daughter had arrived in Traverse City as promised. Meanwhile, the girl’s father called United’s frequent flyer number (he had paid for the tickets using frequent flyer miles) and got them to connect him with a customer service representative in Chicago, who told him that the third-party company that handles unaccompanied minor services for United in Chicago had “forgotten” to pick up his daughter, and the airline had no idea where she was now…

The father asked the CSR in Chicago to go look for his daughter, but was told that the CSR was going off shift and couldn’t help. However, after appealing to the CSR as one parent to another and begging for help, the United people in Chicago were eventually able to find the missing girl and get her to Traverse City just 4 hours late. Her luggage was another matter, however; that didn’t turn up for several days. The family asked the airline to refund the unaccompanied minor fee, but could not get any response to either telephone or written enquiries until the local television station in San Francisco took an interest. Finally this week United released a statement saying they had apologized to the family and were refunding both the fee and the frequent flyer miles. There’s no word on whether a lawsuit is coming, although if there isn’t one the company and its stockholders should all give thanks to whoever looks out for transportation companies...

Now, this really wasn’t an atrocity; there is no indication that United ever actually lost the young passenger, or that she was ever in danger of anything beyond extreme boredom. It is, however, an example of business practices so bad that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how bad it is. I can’t imagine why anybody would use a third-party company for this service in the first place, or why the CSR in Chicago would have said they did if they don’t; I also can’t imagine why United didn’t go berserk the moment someone told them that their third-party service had “forgotten” to show up. If anything had happened to the child in our story this could have exploded into a massive lawsuit costing tens of millions to settle and even more to fight, not to mention criminal charges and a possible Federal investigation. As it stands, only the merest chance seems to have saved the company from a fatal disaster of its own making…

And I can’t speak for any of my readers (assuming I have readers), but if I own stock in this flying madhouse, I’m going to sell it before the bottom drops out…