When it comes to travel, I’m a planner. Once I know I will be going somewhere, whether business or pleasure, I sort out my travel arrangements. Does this save me money? Often, yes. But that’s not my primary motivation. I just like to have things sorted.
Since 9/11, I have come to expect that the airlines will shift flights around a bit as they consolidate similar flights to save money, increase profitability. Usually it’s a change of 20-40 minutes in departure time. Once in a while it is a change in aircraft that impacts seating, but luckily I’ve never lost my seat as a result.
But the latest change I received from JetBlue indicates just how little the airline really cares about customer satisfaction.
I’m flying out to San Francisco in July with my mom and son for BlogHer. Afterward, we are driving up to Sonoma for a couple days, planning to return home Wednesday. We booked a redeye back to Boston on JetBlue, a direct flight, leaving 10ish, arriving 7ish the next day. I booked this flight MONTHS AGO.
Today I got an email saying we’d been changed to a flight leaving at 1:35 pm, arriving in Boston at 10:19 pm.
For those keeping track, that means we’ll be home before we had planned to leave California.
I called customer service, because this was a pretty big shift in time with no explanation. The rep told me that now none of the evening flights are direct to Boston. Our original evening flight would now go through JFK in New York. Assuming I preferred a direct flight, JetBlue moved us to the earlier flight.
And that’s the problem. Why didn’t the airline ask? I’m a reasonable (if somewhat cranky) person. I understand that the airline needs to make money, and sometimes that means consolidating flights, although I do think they’ve abused our tolerance more than a bit on this in recent months.
But this is a pretty significant time change. Wouldn’t it make sense to give the customer a choice, rather than present a fait accompli? Especially a customer that had booked so far in advance. What if my plans precluded such a drastic time change?
It’s a choice between two bad options — lose a day of vacation or have a stopover in JFK. But JetBlue should give the customer the choice, not make it for them.
Needless to say, after this July trip, I won’t be jetting on JetBlue anytime soon.
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UPDATE — A clarification on the flight consolidation issue mentioned above. All the airlines are doing this far more than they should and abusing travellers’ goodwill in the process. Not just JetBlue. (5/27/08, 1 pm EDT)
Tags: JetBlue, customer satisfaction
This stinks. I had hoped that JetBlue would be different. I am flying JetBlue for BlogHer, as well. Keeping my fingers crossed that my experience will be a bit better than yous. 🙁
I recently had a really bad jetBlue experience and also blogged with it. All in all, jetBlue needs to do more if they want to make it. Racking up bad blog posts ain’t the way.
Dear Ms. Getgood,
I apologize for the automatic rebooking! Please give me a call or email me and we’ll see about changing your flights for something more to your liking.
We do an auto-rebook when we have a schedule change, because it locks a seat in on the other flight, and it’s definately something we can change if the rebooking doesn’t work out.
Thank you!
Jenny Dervin
Director, Corporate Communications
(I don’t do the rebooking, but I’ll coordinate it for you.)