Why There is no Five-star treatment in an airplane

by Brenda Desjardins

Recently I had lunch at a five-star hotel. The extremely polite and charming staff guided me every step of the way through a delightful experience, and two hours later I left feeling gleefully relaxed and sinfully indulgent. It cost $66 and I was hungry an hour and a half later, but with no regrets. It felt good to be pampered.

That's the kind of treatment airline passengers want--customer service. But unlike the modest portions on my plate at lunch, that passenger has just flown a full 700 miles from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle on the airline I work for, and it cost him $7 less than my lunch and $10 less than a Greyhound bus.

Airline passengers have started to treat airline employees with a blatant disrespect. They swear at us, throw their boarding passes at us and take pleasure in telling us we work for a lousy company and they'll never fly with us again. Fortunately, passenger service agents can take solace in the fact that they are not alone, it is happening to other airline employees all over the country. We're getting abused from both sides, the companies and their clients.

Passengers are upset that they have to wait longer to speak to an agent and their bags aren't waiting for them by the time they reach the baggage terminal. They are looking for a ticket counter full of agents waiting to please them, answer their questions and help them with future plans. What they are finding instead is a row of kiosks so they can check themselves in, change their own seats, upgrade themselves, generate their own bag tags, get their own boarding pass and find their gate themselves.

They're upset and they're taking it out on us, the customer service agent, once trained in passenger care, now trained to point out those machines with a smile and advice if they push the wrong buttons.

Why is it none of them want to take any responsibility? They are, after all, pointing and clicking agents out of a job. They buy their ticket online, check in online and pay less than the cost of a nice meal ticket, but they fail to see their role in the lack of customer service.

Maybe one day, since inflight meals are almost a thing of the past, we won't need as many flight attendants either. Maybe we can outsource their jobs to electronics and just show safety videos. Hopefully, if you have a medical emergency onboard you will still be capable of pressing all the right keys to figure out how to use that emergency defibrillator before it's too late.

Airline passengers need to wake up and smell the coffee, while it's still being served. Airline employees want to provide better service, but their customers have all voted against it, they would rather have low prices. Don't take it out on us, send the company an email.

The above article originally appeared in the flight attendants' union publication Tradewinds.