Airline Follies International

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog making fun of the airlines – partly because they make such an easy target, and partly because they give me so many opportunities to work with. It’s not really fair, of course; shoving 200 or more people into a narrow aluminum tube and then making them sit quietly in uncomfortable seats for a few hours isn’t easy at the best of times. When you include factors that are largely out of your control (such as the price of jet fuel, the price of gate use fees, the cost of food, the cost of unionized labor) and factors that are completely out of your control (the weather, gate delays, runway and taxiway delays, grounding of all flights because someone from a competitor has crashed their airplane into a mountain, grounding of all flights because a competitor hasn’t been doing the required maintenance, or grounding of all flights because some idiot thought it would be okay to smuggle something that might or might not have been a bomb into a random plane somewhere at the airport) it’s amazing that anyone ever has a favorable flying experience. But the reason these companies make such easy targets lies in the fact that after allowing for all of those unforeseeable factors, they still follow management practices that a six-year-old would know better than to allow – and, apparently, things get even worse outside the US…

Take for example the recent case (August 9) when Air Berlin, Germany’s second largest passenger carrier, managed to leave almost 200 items of checked luggage off of a flight from Stockholm to Berlin – every single bag that was supposed to be on the plane wasn’t. Right off the bat, this would have been a huge issue in the US, where every bag is required by law to be on the same plane as the person who checked it. But leaving aside the fact that both the FAA and the FBI would have been all over an episode like that, if an American company managed to lose that much luggage all at one go they’d most likely have realized that they were about to have a planeload of angry passengers raising cane, and done something about it – even if that was just a bunch of groveling emails and phone calls, and maybe a public apology online or in a full-page ad in a newspaper. Because Americans love some schadenfreude, and they would have wound up being mocked by thousands of commentators who aren’t obscure, scruffy bloggers. And also because in this country, telling someone you can’t find their property and can’t help them get anyone else to help either will get you sued…

Apparently things are easier in Europe, however, because in the linked Slate article there are cases of people asking the airline (via Twitter) for help and being told to call the airport lost-and-found – and, on being told that the lost-and-found isn’t responding, the airline refusing to help any further. It’s hard to tell without any connection more direct than the Slate story, but it sounds as if the airline is blaming the airport, the airport is blaming the airline, and neither one is allowing the passengers involved to have a voice number with which to demand an explanation. Unless there’s an equivalent to the FAA, or possibly the U.S. Attorney’s office, somewhere in the EU it may take a private lawsuit to break this Catch-22 cycle – and I’m not sure how that works in Europe, either…

Now, unless you’re a fairly active world traveler this may never be an issue for you. There are, after all, other European carriers you could select, and a number of the US airlines do business in Europe. It may take a bit of effort to avoid being routed onto an Air Berlin flight through the One World Alliance, given that several US carriers are part of that program, and sometimes you can’t control who will be operating the airplane on the next leg of your voyage. The real lesson here isn’t so much “airlines are idiots” (we’ve been over that) or even “European airlines are bigger idiots” (one episode isn’t really enough to go on, even one as heinous as this one), but rather that social media by themselves aren’t going to be enough to gain any competitive advantage, let alone sustain one…

(Continued…)