Gulliver | The price of being nice

Treating flyers well is bad for airlines’ business

By A.W. | WASHINGTON, DC

FOR all the frequent travellers out there just aching for airlines to make the flying experience slightly less unpleasant, there’s one fundamental obstacle: you. The airline industry recently undertook a wide-ranging study of passenger satisfaction, surveying 60,000 passengers on 30 airlines in 39 hub airports around the world, and examining 75 factors that contribute to a flyer’s satisfaction level.

The results make for sobering reading. The study concluded that there is no correlation between customers’ happiness and an airline’s commercial success. In other words, airlines can do all they want to pamper travellers—provide friendlier service, roomier seats, more movie options, better food, greater punctuality—and none of it is likely to lead to higher profits.

“We saw there is no link,” Tim-Jasper Schaaf of the International Air Transport Association said in an address at the group’s World Passenger Summit in Hamburg, as reported by the travel news site Skift. “We couldn’t really prove that if your customers are happy you’ll be a commercially successfully airline.”

Gulliver reported last week on efforts by airlines to lure customers with new perks. Leading the way is Virgin America, which announced that it would allow passengers to stream movies on Netflix and songs on Spotify, as well as read news stories from the New York Times. The hope is that these features can trump the tendency of flight bookers to make decisions based almost entirely on price, and lure people to flights that may not be quite the cheapest but promise a more pleasant experience.

The IATA report appears to throw cold water on that dream. Part of the problem, Mr Schaaf said, is that customers quickly grow accustomed to new perks, such as flat beds in business class, or Wi-Fi, and then are simply annoyed when the features are not present. And even when customers are more satisfied with their flight, it doesn’t translate into better business for the airline.

The result of this double-whammy could very well be exactly what many travellers dread, even if their wallets don’t: a further trend toward a bare-bones flying experience, maximising cost efficiency at the expense of an enjoyable flight.

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