Branding and Loyalty

Ignoring, for a moment, the conjunction of those two words with respect to cults and organisations (and some fraternities), I’d like to share some thoughts about branding and loyalty in airlines. As you, my dear readers, might recall, Aimee and I had gone to Los Angeles and Oklahoma for Thanksgiving (late November), and then to Jamaica for Christmas.

Well, as it turned out, we had two starkly contrasting airline experiences. For the first trip, we booked all the flights on Southwest airlines. Southwest is well-known as a budget airline. On the flights you get pretzels and drinks galore, which is fine. You don’t pay much, and you don’t expect much. That, and when you get a boarding card, there are no seat numbers on it. You just board (at the right time, because passengers are placed in different zones) and then pick out a seat you might like. Aimee and I tend to prefer the rear of the aircraft, which is not a popular destination, but very very convenient (except if you’re in a hurry to deboard at the end of the flight). Southwest, however, exceeded our expectations. Without exception, all the cabin crew members were friendly and happy and smiley. They were courteous and not once did I see even a hint of a frown. This, despite some of our flights being completely full. And, on another occasion, populated by a noisy bunch of high-schoolers (noisy being the keyword, because they were a very nice bunch of students — headed to LA for a marching band competition (and by the way, some of them played bagpipes, which is simply the coolest thing I’ve ever heard)).

Anyway, the cabin crew: they were also really funny. The ones making announcements always had a funny quip like “if we expected a water landing, none of us would have shown up to work today.” And one of them called the plane the “Love Chub” which is just hilarious.

While I’m gushing about Southwest, I just want to compliment them on their choice of new livery. That old brown/beige/orange scheme just had to go. It was ugly and made their planes look ancient and rickety. I can’t wait for the rest of the fleet to be redone. We even saw Shamu at LAX, which was very cool.

Oh right, I have a point with all this. For Christmas, we booked our flights on the fairly pathetic USAir. The preflight experience (booking, check-in, boarding) was normal and fine. Friendly staff, quick service. Onboard, however, is a different world entirely. I believe one of the cabin crew members even had a scowl. For heaven’s sake, it’s a public facing job — put on your public face! They just wanted people to sit in their seats and get ready to go, because we were running late. What they forgot was that it wasn’t the passengers who caused the delay — the aircraft arrived late. We, the passengers, were just working with what we had. So, lots of down-talking and PA announcements about “please don’t waste time in the aisles — place your bags away as quickly as possible and sit so that we can leave.”

Once airborne on the 4 hour international flight, they serve the requisite peanuts and soft drinks. Here’s the kicker: for lunch, you get a choice of a salad, or a sandwich or some sort of snack box. Now, Aimee and I had gotten up mega-early for this flight so we basically skipped breakfast, and the flight to Philly was too short to have anything to eat. It was that first flight that was late. So in Philly we had enough time to go into the next plane, and that’s about it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the snack box. All three items could be had at the, um “bargain basement” price gouging cost of 5 dollars. I get it, we’re in the air, you have the monopoly, if not the sense of customer service. Fine, we think, we’ll shell out the five bucks each for the salad, because we’re basically starved. We’re in the rear section (not the very back, but about 10 rows in front of it). By the time they get to us, the only thing left is this mysterious snackbox. We bought one, even though that was simply ridiculous. In it: a bar of candy, a breakfast bar, and nachos and processed cheese or something. Basically, nasty pre-packaged stuff that USAir probably gets for free to promote those products anyway — they just have to provide the “box” part of the snack box.

So, you open your tray table and what do you see? Not a tray table, but a freaking advertisement for Verizon. I paid money to sit in a seat and look at advertisements (this, by the way, is also what disgusts me about movie theaters these days, but that’s a different blog post) for four hours. Five dollars is a magic number on USAir: that’s coincidentally how much the cheap ass earphones cost (we did not, don’t worry).

So top it all off, they ended the flight on a very inappropriate note. The pilot, when announcing our imminent landing procedures, proceeded to inform us about what a great deal the USAir credit card is, and the number of miles that you get for signing up? Excuse me? How about you just fly the fucking plane, ok? Tell me the local time and temperature and other interesting tidbits I can’t see out my window. Don’t pimp.

Needless to say, I’m willing to now pay extra to explicitly not fly USAir. Air Jamaica feeds you well, I hear.

This was a pretty long rant: sorry about that.