First there was United Airlines and the infamous leggings stumble. Then they one-upped themselves by dragging a gentleman from an overbooked flight. Then Delta got in on the action and booted an entire family.
So when news broke out of a brawl between angry passengers and airline employees/police at Fort Lauderdale airport, we all sighed collectively and asked: “What have they done now?”
It turns out they cancelled around 300 flights over the course of seven days!
Yikes.
And so the question must be asked. What in the world is going on?
Well, here’s the thing: airlines—especially budget airlines—are simply failing to put the customer first.
Could chaos at the Florida airport have been avoided? Absolutely.
How? Well it’s not as complicated as you may have thought…
…Put the customer first.
Look, we know Spirit’s blaming its pilots for the cancellations but we’re not getting into their internal contract negotiations. We’re primarily concerned about the impact on Spirit’s customers and the response those infuriated customers then had.
What’s clear is that the contract negotiations with Spirit Airline pilots have clearly been dragging on for a while and it appears that Spirit Airlines were clearly aware of the possible impact – cancelled flights. They’ve been cancelling flights for over a week and it’s fair to conclude that additional flight cancellations were indeed a possibility and, therefore, customers would be inconvenienced (to say the least).
It doesn’t take a rocket-plane scientist to work out that’s going to leave some unhappy customers.
Spirit Airlines should have anticipated this. They should have communicated clearly and calmly what was going on. They should have made backup plans to help their customers. And really, they should be sorting out their ability to deliver their product.
They could have avoided this. But they didn’t.
It’s not hard to work out what the customers want. It’s a flight on a giant metal bird! So deliver it to them!
We’ll all soon be able to watch the blame game in action as the dust settles, but it’s clear to us that if Spirit Airlines, and the other global-trotting airlines, really put their customers first, our news journalists will have to resort to going back to headlines about Donald Trump and Hollywood break-ups.
