The Love - Hate Relationship with Airlines

Full disclosure, I do not know any of the people in this photo. What stood out for me was that they were likely upset about something that was beyond the ticketing agents control, and because the agent is the company representative they are the proverbial punching bag for every dissatisfied customer complaint. As someone who has spent lots of times on planes, I both empathize with the couple and sympathize with the gate agent. The better part of me is aware that gate agents have little to no control over the most common customer complaints (delays, boarding order, checked bags, etc.). Yet I find myself often biting my lip and cursing the family names of many of these agents under my breath when I too and the recipient of bad news. We are only human, and so are they.

What inspired this article was the recent news that American is buying a fleet of planes with even smaller bathrooms. For those of us who have been in an airplane bathroom, this move seems absurd. Currently they are just barely big enough for someone like myself (see: 32 year old with a 45 year old body and a heart of gold) to turn around without being assaulted by the walls surrounding me. To add insult to some injury, at the recent Aircraft Interiors Expo a company proposed standing seats on airlines instead of actual seats. The idea being that standing seats provide more legroom, but require you to basically stand. Novel idea, but seemingly plagued with issues for elderly, handicapped, and anyone who has ever had a groin crushing experience on a stand up roller coaster.

These suggestions give the impression that airlines hate people. It makes you wonder if airline executives have flown coach in the past 20 years, and have an empathetic understanding of what it's like being slightly overweight or six feet plus tall, or both. Never mind that there is a distinct possibility that the person in front of you will press their seat all the way back therefore rendering you almost immobile and confined to your economy class prison.

My people geek senses were tingling. Do airlines really hate their passengers? What about their employees? When changes to policies and processes that affect passengers are put in place it's not the CFO who has to hear from the disgruntled customer it's the gate agent, the attendant and the pilots. Adding this stress to your employees plate can only lead to a less than ideal employee experience, even if it is just part of the job. It got me thinking; how do customers and employees feel about airlines?

The Metrics

In order to understand how both customers and employees feel about their airlines, I needed to know what the standards of measurement were for each. The ones that I chose for customer satisfaction were the following:

• AQR - "The Airline Quality Rating (AQR) is the most comprehensive study of performance and quality of the largest airlines in the United States. The rating is a multifactor examination of the airlines based on mishandled baggage, consumer complaints, on-time performance and involuntary denied boardings."
• J.D. Power 2017 Airline Customer Satisfaction Study - J.D. Power ranks airlines in two categories; traditional (T) and low-cost (LC)

To measure employee satisfaction the most widespread metric was Glassdoor ratings. Since only three of the twelve domestic airlines were ranked on Forbes' Best Places to Work 2018, Glassdoor provided the most comprehensive view of all the twelve airlines measured. As an aside, all these metrics and sources should be taken with a grain of salt. Glassdoor in particular is not a great repository to capture the most positive employee experiences, as they can get bogged down by the negative. It is actually one of the reasons that I hope companies publish their high-level engagement data publicly so people can get a more honest sense of employee sentiment.

The Results

Disclaimer: I am not a statistician and math is my kryptonite.

To help understand some of this it should be noted that not every airline was ranked with J.D. Power and/or AQR. In addition the J.D. Power survey is split into two parts, reflected as "T" for traditional airline and "LC" for low-cost airline.

Here are my observations based on the above and the sources:

1.Budget airlines such as Spirit, ExpressJet, and Frontier performed poorly on both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction measurements

2. United is the only airline that has a top five Glassdoor rating, but not a top five AQR. They do however rank #4 in the J.D. Power traditional airline ranking

3.The average Glassdoor rating is 3.7 across all twelve

4.Despite bad press, airline satisfaction is improving.

5. Ten out of twelve airlines lowest rated area on Glassdoor is "senior management".

Thoughts:

Delta being a traditional airline has a distinct story to tell here. They rank high on both customer and employee satisfaction metrics, and have even been recognized as #17 on Forbes' best employers 2018 list. To further add some spice to the mix, "... in 2016, Delta Air Lines, Inc. received 150,000 applications for 1200 flight attendant openings, meaning less than 1% of applicants were hired. Mathematically speaking, it is five times harder to get a flight attendant job at Delta than it is to get accepted to Harvard, which had a 2016 acceptance rate of 5.4%. "

Alaska Airlines and Southwest both also perform extremely well in both customer and employees satisfaction. It's no surprise that Southwest performed well in these areas, as they have regularly been applauded for their outstanding company culture. Alaska Airlines also goes so far to publish their employee engagement data which some may consider extremely sensitive information and in some cases embarrassing.

When it comes to lowest ranking areas of employee satisfaction, it comes as no surprise that "senior management" is the overwhelming trend. This supports my initial thought that airline executives make decisions that seem disconnected from both customers and the employees that serve them. This makes even more sense when you consider that ultra low-cost airlines such as Spirit and Frontier perform extremely poorly in all areas, and I personally have yet to speak with a passenger who has had a good experience on one of their flights.

On a personal note I am a regular American Airlines passenger. I have banked my status, miles, and probably a portion of my life with them over the past seven years. As someone who tends to ere on the side of optimism, it was intriguing to see that they recently ran their first employee survey in ten years! The results seem to validate the above findings, and most poignantly that "a mere 32 percent of American employees believe that the management listens to them and wants to understand their feelings." The notion of not feeling heard is one of the top reasons that employees quit.

Conclusions

My initial inspiration for this article was to see if airlines really do hate people. I don't think I've proved that they do or don't, but have discovered that there is a strong connection between a positive employee experience and a positive customer experience. Deep down I can't believe that there is a hate for people or customers, but sometimes it can feel that way even when it's farthest from the truth. Given that disruption in the airline industry is costly and prohibitive (see FAA) from a regulatory perspective, do airlines have both customers and employees against a wall? It's still unclear, but worth paying attention to. Regardless of the disconnect between the executive and front line, being culture first is critical to continued success, and there is still more work to be done.