With higher fares and fees passengers want better service

Last week, on a rainy day at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a passenger’s suitcase that was tagged for Colorado Springs lay outside a terminal building, on the ground, under the conveyor belt system that moves the baggage of American Airline passengers between the terminals and the planes.

An airline field representative was showing a reporter the route that bags follow on the conveyor system when he noticed the bag and commented that it must have fallen off the conveyor belt or one of the baggage handlers’ vehicles. He wasn’t sure how long it might have been lying on the ground.

Over the last year, airlines have raised airfare, introduced new fees, added fuel surcharges, cut flights and even cut out snack services – all to help combat the crippling cost of fuel.

At the same time, a number of airlines – both large and small – have been struggling in areas such as baggage handling, on-time arrival and departure performance, and various other customer service performance metrics. A survey that was released by the University of Michigan in May saw customers rating airlines at the lowest levels since 2001.

With the busy summer travel season over, and a much slower travel period at hand, airlines are being forced to deal with the challenge of increasing revenue to offset fuel costs, which are still high, and improving their services to ensure that passengers feel they are receiving a reasonable return on the added cost of their travel.

“We realize that in order for us to regain that brand recognition and the customer loyalty that we used to own in the ’80s and ’90s, we ought to do something very dramatic and different,” noted the managing director of the customer service experience at American Airlines, Mark Mitchell.

www.aa.com