"How to complain to an airline ... and get results"

[SteveJohnson]

Every airline makes mistakes — admittedly some more than others — and every traveller has been caught out by delays, lost luggage, faulty seats, a borked inflight entertainment systems or other items on the long list of Things That Can Go Wrong.

And when things do go wrong with an airline, it's often difficult to get your problems resolved then and there.

Frontline staffers and cabin crew often lack the authority to sign off on fixing your problem -- or they're just completely swamped with hundreds of other customers in a similar boat to you.

So you're left to complain to the airline.

But how do you maximise your chances of getting what you need? Here's some hard-won advice on how to complain — and get results.

Source: Airline complaints | How to get your complaint addressed | Tips

 

[Hvr]

Nothing there about posting to AFF or FT and whinging.

Fairly basic stuff that is applicable to any merchant you're complaining to.

 

[elbarto]

That's seems to be the first place people complain

 

[Fruitcake]

...Outfit stained by a flight crew accident?...

If you've managed to annoy enough people that flight crew is coming out of the coughpit to personally empty wine on you, I think you've got bigger issues than worrying about speedy complaint resolution!

 

[RooFlyer]

<snip>
Fairly basic stuff that is applicable to any merchant you're complaining to.

Yes, but airlines tend to put up fairly imprenetrable walls to customers with a real grievance. Such as the 'web site complaint form' (with no guarantee of any response); "customer service" call centres (either staffed by 'experts' in mollifying the customer without any connection to addressing the root cause (if any) of the complaint, or people with no authority to do anything but log a call). etc

They get such a huge volume of complaints, with a goodly % presumably in the 'trivial' range that you can see why they try to weed out as much as the trivial stuff by these walls. But it makes it doubly frustrating when you believe you have a genuine grievance and/or take the position if management isn't made aware of a 'bad service thing', then they can't do anything about it.

I took the latter view in a baggage saga last year - there were snafus upon snafus. I contacted Qantas locally (took a bit of doing) and asked for an appointment to see the State Manager (not one of the 'major' states ) to discuss. In the end, we had a coffee, I showed him my log of stuff-ups & issues (from international departure point to local airport) and we ended up discussing a lot of QF things from a WP point of view. If he didn't appreciate the discussion, he was gracious enough to not show it.

He took away my list, got answers from relevant baggage managers and we had another coffee a month or so later and he went through it. It found a couple of gaps in QF's lost baggage chain of communication when the bags need to be on-forwarded from arrival point in Australia.

I didn't ask for any compo, and he didn't offer, but he said he learnt quite a bit (as did I) and I believe were both the better informed for the experience.

My suggestion: If you really want some attention to the issue, make a friendly approach to senior people locally and go through it personally in a constructive manner. Seniority will depend on local volume I guess. If they are worth their salt, they'll be grateful for it.

 

[Berlin]

Hmm- pretty much the kind of stuff you need to do wherever you are complaining. To some master-complainers like grumpy German myself, it might seem like beginner's talk but not taking the name and time spoken to staff is probably the biggest mistake many people make. And in the case of off-shore callcenters, getting that name spelled in detail is often not an easy task!
The only point I'm surprised about is the Twitter thing but maybe Airlines are the exception there. I've found lately that this is often the best channel to get anything resolved. I don't use Twitter much usually but it's often gold for complaints. Most likely because it's THE thing to do at the moment and companies seem to pour lots of money into the channel.

 

[whatmeworry]

I think twitter and facebook are your best bets these days. By going public it forces them to acknowledge the problem and usually get some type of resolution.