Glitches cloud US Airways' outlook
Complaints mar flier satisfaction; airline ramps up effort to change
Dawn Gilbertson
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 15, 2007 12:00 AM
After US Airways stumbled its way through a changeover of its reservations system and a paralyzing ice storm last month, CEO Doug Parker conceded that the Tempe-based airline risked losing passengers if it didn't get its act together soon.
"You can run a substandard airline for a short period of time, but you can't do it for a long period," he said.
The $11 billion question for US Airways and its shareholders is: How long is too long? advertisement
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At what point will frequent fliers, many frustrated by months of mediocre service, be fed up enough to retreat in numbers that would have a negative impact on US Airways' annual revenue? Signs are present that some business travelers are close to running out of patience. An organized and vocal group of fliers is threatening to bolt en masse, taking several million dollars' worth of its annual business.
"People are reaching their boiling point," said Art Pushkin, co-chairman of Frequent Fliers Committed to US Airways Success, or FFOCUS. The five-year-old group presented a long list of concerns to US Airways executives in a meeting a few weeks ago.
The airline is confident it can keep this group and others with a multipronged plan to turn the operation around. It says it hasn't seen any groundswell of departures yet and, in fact, has seen a significant increase in the ranks of top-level fliers.
"So far, they're putting up with this," said Travis Christ, vice president of sales and marketing. "It's not too late."
Frustrations grow
Pushkin, a Long Island, N.Y.-based regional sales manager for a digital imaging company, said that frustration has been building since November and escalated with the problems of the past few months.
Parker has called this the worst quarter since the 2005 merger of America West and US Airways. Costs from flight cancellations, delays and fallout cut into its first-quarter profit.
FFOCUS has added 100 members in the past two months, Pushkin said, many asking for help in finding other airlines that will match members' frequent-flier status. Status determines such perks as first-class upgrades.
Among top issues members cited in an online poll: unreliable flights; few answers or slow response to questions and complaints; Web-site glitches; and reduced frequent-flier benefits, from bonus mileage to fewer first-class seats.
The general sense is that the company is "taking the cheap way around," Pushkin said.
He added that frequent fliers are looking for a "peace pipe."
They want US Airways to fix problems laid out and to acknowledge, "Hey, you know what, we've neglected our frequent fliers; we're sorry."
Pushkin came from the meeting with company executives with mixed feelings.
"My sense is that they understand that there's a problem and that they're not sure what they can do about it," he said.
Fixing the problems
Christ and other US Airways executives, in interviews at the company's headquarters Thursday, said they have been distracted the past year by the complex work leading up to the early March changeover to the single computer reservations system and have some catching up to do in certain areas.
They said they are working furiously to turn the operation around so the airline doesn't lose passengers in a repeat of a costly scenario at the old America West Airlines in 2000, under some of the same leadership including CEO Doug Parker.
In that case, maintenance problems spiraled and forced unprecedented flight cancellations and delays. The company's earnings were hurt as business travelers booked elsewhere. The airline temporarily shrank its operation to get things under control.
"If there was an eighth day of the week, we'd like to have it," said Anthony Mulé, senior vice president of customer service.
He said US Airways currently is working through a laundry list of tasks to improve customer service. The tasks include:
• Methodically tackling the long list of lingering computer bugs.
• Hiring 30 temporary customer-service employees to resolve a backlog of complaints.
• Resurrecting a program to get hundreds of early-morning flights, called "launch flights," out on time to lessen the ripple effects early flight delays and cancellations cause.
• Continuing to throw resources into its troubled Philadelphia hub, where flight delays and baggage handling remain big problems despite some progress.
• Hiring, as a pre-emptive move, extra airport customer service workers for the summer, primarily on the East Coast.
• Spreading out its summer flight schedule, especially at its Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C., hubs, so there is more wiggle room in case of delays. Fewer flights will be scheduled during peak times.
• Upgrading its inflight service, from food and training for flight attendants, to a "revolutionary" seat-back entertainment system. The first improvements will debut this summer; the entertainment system will begin a trial period early next year.
• Redesigning usairways.com, with a new site debuting next year.
"It is a big ship to turn, (and) it is turning, no question," Christ said. "We will absolutely get up from this."
He and other executives said telephone hold times are back to normal, complaints are not out of control. And they cite many positives from the single reservations system, such as less passenger confusion and a smoother automatic upgrade system.
Challenges remain
Six weeks after the switch to a single reservations system, however, it is clear much work still is ahead on that front.
An internal newsletter sent out to airport customer service workers throughout the company, dubbed "Migration Relief," after the reservations migration project, lists page after page of to-do items, a third of them severe enough to have an impact on customers and to delay flights.
The airline's on-time performance so far this month, as of Thursday, is 62.5 percent, far short of the 82 percent goal. The company notes that the on-time rate for the early flights it is zeroing in on is 74 percent and was 80 percent until the spring storm in the Midwest last week.
Mike Boyd, a longtime aviation consultant with a firm bearing his name in Colorado Springs, thinks time is running out for the company to deliver, in part because of executives' cocky attitude last year about how smoothly the merger was going.
"If it weren't for all the hyperbole that they shot out during that Delta merger proposal, you could cut them a little slack," he said.
Labor issues
Boyd said the old US Airways and America West, now known internally as the East and West operations of the new US Airways, essentially remain separate.
Route networks and employee groups can't be combined until they have new contracts, and they don't yet have them for most groups including pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and baggage handlers.
The fractured workplace is at the root of some of the airline's operational problems, he and others said.
"You don't have a team there," Boyd said. "Unless they can nip those things together, they're going to start running intro trouble. Wall Street is going to start losing patience with them and all this 'rah, rah' and say, 'You've got to put it together, guys.' "
The pilots, among other frontline employees, have gotten an earful from employees the past couple of rocky months, often about issues they feel are out of their control.
In response, the union made up business cards for pilots to hand out to passengers when flight problems arise.
"Comments from our customers are crucial and will help us build the world's best airline," the card reads.
The kicker: It includes a link to the Department of Transportation's Web site for submitting complaints.
US Airways has had among the highest complaint rates in the industry for about a year, ranking above only JetBlue in the most recent report.
Rick Isaac of Scottsdale, a national accounts consultant for a pharmaceutical company and a frequent flier, considers himself fortunate because he wasn't caught up in the reservations problems that snarled airports in places like Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Charlotte, N.C.
He still is shopping for another airline that will match his high-ranking status in the program at US Airways.
He's frustrated because he has noticed more flight delays because of mechanical problems on the carrier's aircraft. He says he has given up e-mailing complaints because they seem to go into a "black hole."
He also dreads calling a customer-service line at night because he's always put on hold or connected to a supervisor for even a simple question.
"They can talk in their nice little (in-flight) magazine that they're customer-service oriented," Isaac said. "The bottom line is, 'You're not walking the talk.' "
Complaints mar flier satisfaction; airline ramps up effort to change
Dawn Gilbertson
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 15, 2007 12:00 AM
After US Airways stumbled its way through a changeover of its reservations system and a paralyzing ice storm last month, CEO Doug Parker conceded that the Tempe-based airline risked losing passengers if it didn't get its act together soon.
"You can run a substandard airline for a short period of time, but you can't do it for a long period," he said.
The $11 billion question for US Airways and its shareholders is: How long is too long? advertisement
At what point will frequent fliers, many frustrated by months of mediocre service, be fed up enough to retreat in numbers that would have a negative impact on US Airways' annual revenue? Signs are present that some business travelers are close to running out of patience. An organized and vocal group of fliers is threatening to bolt en masse, taking several million dollars' worth of its annual business.
"People are reaching their boiling point," said Art Pushkin, co-chairman of Frequent Fliers Committed to US Airways Success, or FFOCUS. The five-year-old group presented a long list of concerns to US Airways executives in a meeting a few weeks ago.
The airline is confident it can keep this group and others with a multipronged plan to turn the operation around. It says it hasn't seen any groundswell of departures yet and, in fact, has seen a significant increase in the ranks of top-level fliers.
"So far, they're putting up with this," said Travis Christ, vice president of sales and marketing. "It's not too late."
Frustrations grow
Pushkin, a Long Island, N.Y.-based regional sales manager for a digital imaging company, said that frustration has been building since November and escalated with the problems of the past few months.
Parker has called this the worst quarter since the 2005 merger of America West and US Airways. Costs from flight cancellations, delays and fallout cut into its first-quarter profit.
FFOCUS has added 100 members in the past two months, Pushkin said, many asking for help in finding other airlines that will match members' frequent-flier status. Status determines such perks as first-class upgrades.
Among top issues members cited in an online poll: unreliable flights; few answers or slow response to questions and complaints; Web-site glitches; and reduced frequent-flier benefits, from bonus mileage to fewer first-class seats.
The general sense is that the company is "taking the cheap way around," Pushkin said.
He added that frequent fliers are looking for a "peace pipe."
They want US Airways to fix problems laid out and to acknowledge, "Hey, you know what, we've neglected our frequent fliers; we're sorry."
Pushkin came from the meeting with company executives with mixed feelings.
"My sense is that they understand that there's a problem and that they're not sure what they can do about it," he said.
Fixing the problems
Christ and other US Airways executives, in interviews at the company's headquarters Thursday, said they have been distracted the past year by the complex work leading up to the early March changeover to the single computer reservations system and have some catching up to do in certain areas.
They said they are working furiously to turn the operation around so the airline doesn't lose passengers in a repeat of a costly scenario at the old America West Airlines in 2000, under some of the same leadership including CEO Doug Parker.
In that case, maintenance problems spiraled and forced unprecedented flight cancellations and delays. The company's earnings were hurt as business travelers booked elsewhere. The airline temporarily shrank its operation to get things under control.
"If there was an eighth day of the week, we'd like to have it," said Anthony Mulé, senior vice president of customer service.
He said US Airways currently is working through a laundry list of tasks to improve customer service. The tasks include:
• Methodically tackling the long list of lingering computer bugs.
• Hiring 30 temporary customer-service employees to resolve a backlog of complaints.
• Resurrecting a program to get hundreds of early-morning flights, called "launch flights," out on time to lessen the ripple effects early flight delays and cancellations cause.
• Continuing to throw resources into its troubled Philadelphia hub, where flight delays and baggage handling remain big problems despite some progress.
• Hiring, as a pre-emptive move, extra airport customer service workers for the summer, primarily on the East Coast.
• Spreading out its summer flight schedule, especially at its Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C., hubs, so there is more wiggle room in case of delays. Fewer flights will be scheduled during peak times.
• Upgrading its inflight service, from food and training for flight attendants, to a "revolutionary" seat-back entertainment system. The first improvements will debut this summer; the entertainment system will begin a trial period early next year.
• Redesigning usairways.com, with a new site debuting next year.
"It is a big ship to turn, (and) it is turning, no question," Christ said. "We will absolutely get up from this."
He and other executives said telephone hold times are back to normal, complaints are not out of control. And they cite many positives from the single reservations system, such as less passenger confusion and a smoother automatic upgrade system.
Challenges remain
Six weeks after the switch to a single reservations system, however, it is clear much work still is ahead on that front.
An internal newsletter sent out to airport customer service workers throughout the company, dubbed "Migration Relief," after the reservations migration project, lists page after page of to-do items, a third of them severe enough to have an impact on customers and to delay flights.
The airline's on-time performance so far this month, as of Thursday, is 62.5 percent, far short of the 82 percent goal. The company notes that the on-time rate for the early flights it is zeroing in on is 74 percent and was 80 percent until the spring storm in the Midwest last week.
Mike Boyd, a longtime aviation consultant with a firm bearing his name in Colorado Springs, thinks time is running out for the company to deliver, in part because of executives' cocky attitude last year about how smoothly the merger was going.
"If it weren't for all the hyperbole that they shot out during that Delta merger proposal, you could cut them a little slack," he said.
Labor issues
Boyd said the old US Airways and America West, now known internally as the East and West operations of the new US Airways, essentially remain separate.
Route networks and employee groups can't be combined until they have new contracts, and they don't yet have them for most groups including pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and baggage handlers.
The fractured workplace is at the root of some of the airline's operational problems, he and others said.
"You don't have a team there," Boyd said. "Unless they can nip those things together, they're going to start running intro trouble. Wall Street is going to start losing patience with them and all this 'rah, rah' and say, 'You've got to put it together, guys.' "
The pilots, among other frontline employees, have gotten an earful from employees the past couple of rocky months, often about issues they feel are out of their control.
In response, the union made up business cards for pilots to hand out to passengers when flight problems arise.
"Comments from our customers are crucial and will help us build the world's best airline," the card reads.
The kicker: It includes a link to the Department of Transportation's Web site for submitting complaints.
US Airways has had among the highest complaint rates in the industry for about a year, ranking above only JetBlue in the most recent report.
Rick Isaac of Scottsdale, a national accounts consultant for a pharmaceutical company and a frequent flier, considers himself fortunate because he wasn't caught up in the reservations problems that snarled airports in places like Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Charlotte, N.C.
He still is shopping for another airline that will match his high-ranking status in the program at US Airways.
He's frustrated because he has noticed more flight delays because of mechanical problems on the carrier's aircraft. He says he has given up e-mailing complaints because they seem to go into a "black hole."
He also dreads calling a customer-service line at night because he's always put on hold or connected to a supervisor for even a simple question.
"They can talk in their nice little (in-flight) magazine that they're customer-service oriented," Isaac said. "The bottom line is, 'You're not walking the talk.' "
