During staffing shortages and flight delays, ensure passenger satisfaction by maintaining clear, proactive communication about the situation and expected wait times. Prioritize essential tasks and deploy staff to high-impact areas, such as check-in, boarding, and customer service desks. Offer compensation like refreshments or vouchers to ease passenger frustration, and be accessible to address concerns.

If possible, show your face - communicate in person, walk the aisle(s) if passengers are in the aircraft or around the boarding area, as appropriate, to chat and make friendly conversation. If allowed, offer free food/drinks.

Give your airport staff and customer service staff the power and tools to effectively (with minimal invasive work and automated tools) reroute high paying pax in need of getting to their destination via a comprehensive airline partnership network and pre-emptive deterrence planning. Also ensure you have tools at disposal and ready to go; such as decent vouchers for meals, amenities, lounge access and hotel network to wear the delays more effectively. All this needs to be carefully modelled with risk management and schedule robustness teams to calculate its efficacy.