Editorial: Abysmal customer relations

Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001 | 8:59 a.m.

Getting a straight answer from an airline about a flight delay isn't easy, no matter who you are. On a recent flight to Washington from Las Vegas, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid said National Airlines' representatives would not tell him how late his flight was, ostensibly because it didn't want him to switch his flight to a competing airline. The helplessness experienced by the second-highest ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, recounted in a New York Times story on Tuesday, is symptomatic of the customer-service travails that air travelers face. The airlines' poor track record also is why Reid has introduced passenger rights legislation that would require airlines to provide passengers accurate and timely information regarding flight cancellations and delays.

Frequent travelers probably weren't too surprised by a report from the U.S. Department of Transportation's inspector general on Monday that said airlines have been abysmal in addressing flight delays. Some statistics shed light on how terrible the situation has become. Of the nearly 15.5 million flights in 2000, 240,000 flights (which carried 25 million passengers) were either canceled or delayed by half an hour on routes that were deemed "chronically late." These chronically late flights were canceled or delayed at least 40 percent of the time.

It's bad enough that so many flights habitually ran late, but it adds insult to injury when the airlines don't let you know what's happening. For instance, the inspector general observed 550 delayed flights and 160 cancellations at 39 airports. His findings: In 21 percent of the flights that were delayed by more than 20 minutes, the airport's information board wrongly showed that the flight was on time.

The airlines note that airports haven't built enough runways to accommodate all the growth in airline traffic, contributing to the delays. While building more runways is the long-term solution to the problem that Congress, regulators and airports should address immediately, in the short term a simple dose of old-fashioned courtesy would work wonders.

Respect is something that is in short supply in today's society, whether it's in the air or on the ground when dealing with other drivers during the rush-hour commute. But airlines are getting paid to not only deliver passengers from Point A to Point B on time, but they also should show some compassion when delays occur. The more airlines stonewall and mislead their passengers about flight information, the more likely it will become that Congress will pass passenger rights legislation.