Picture this scene: You’re in a borderline second/third-world country for three weeks on business. Your flight was delayed due to mechanical issues, so you missed your connecting flight, got rerouted and had a layover that increased the length of travel by fifteen hours. You arrive at your destination, go through 2.5 hours of passport control, and discover that you have no baggage.
Nobody knows where your baggage is–one airline is blaming another, and you have no business cards, you don’t have your schedule, your cell phone is already dead, and your laptop is about to die. And nobody is returning your phone calls, and you are in an entirely different time-zone from where your luggage was last seen. You have no clothes, and even the basic hygiene supplies in this country are different.
Welcome to my parents’ weekend.
The airline did eventually contact them–to inform them, after three days of silence, that their baggage would be arriving that evening. I’ve noticed in the process of conducting interviews for the next book, that people stress the importance of communication. I think we can safely say that the average airline fails at this, miserably.
I will say this, though–when I called the airline (I was recruited as the Head of North American Operations for Parental Baggage Retrieval because the time difference was not working at all), they returned my call within 3 hours. Of course it was a moot point since they only called to tell me that the luggage was being shipped to the home address, which it wasn’t–it was sent to the hotel to my parents. But at least they returned the call–it makes me think there is hope for ‘good’ customer service for airlines, that the light at the end of the tunnel does exist. It’s just very, very, very, very far away.
