I used to work at the Smoking Lounge at the Denver International Airport. The money was good, and it served a purpose, but it made me realize how terrible air travel actually is. I used to think of airports as this magical place that would whisk people away to various destinations, so everybody should be happy when they visited them. But when I started to work in the airport, I met a lot of unhappy people. Now I do have to keep things in perspective. I worked in the only place in the airport where people could have a cigarette, and we had a one drink minimum at the place. If you want to piss off a smoker who has not had one during a long international flight really quick, just tell them that they have pay in order to get that fix.
But in all fairness, they were not always complaining about their inability to feed their addiction. Many of these people came in with complaints about their airline, United. There were many times where people were bumped from their flights because the company overbooked, and they did not really care about it either. Why should they? It wasn’t their problem.
I do remember coming in to the airport for work and coming in the east entrance because this was the place that had the better parking spots. It was also the side that United did their checkins. It didn’t matter what time I would come in for my shift, there was always a long line of passengers waiting to get on their flight, and only a couple of people working the counter to help all of these people. I could see how some of the frustration that people experienced with this company came from that as well.
I never gave it much attention because I worked on concourse B which was controlled by United so I just believed that I heard all of the complaints from this company because of location. If I worked on one of the other concourses, I would hear complaints about Frontier or Delta. It wasn’t until I got to experience the happy people who work for this company that I started to realize that the complaints that people made were true. I was yelled at in the long line I had to wait through to check my bags. I barely made it to my gate because of the slow way the moved people through that line. And when I got there, they delayed the flight until they could find somebody to give up their seat because they once again overbooked.
I got to enjoy the wonderful customer service that United Airlines has once again this morning. I am stuck in the Redmond Airport right now because they would not let us get through security to get on our plane. I had to stand in a line for forty five minutes that was only twenty people long as they had to deal with individual customers for ten minutes at a time. Premier Access customers were allowed to cut in line for flights that were not leaving for another hour so they could slow down the two employees even more. We had another ten minutes before they were officially boarding but we were denied as well as ten other passengers behind us going on the same flight. There was a group of dissatisfied customers who are stuck in Redmond for another night because they could not accommodate their customers. And the attitude I got from the employees was, I don’t care because I am getting paid.
Now this might come across as a person who is mad because they missed their flight, but according to J.D. Power and Associates’ survey from May of this year, Unites Airlines ranks the lowest out of any airlines in customer satisfaction. I knew this before I flew because this was where they have ranked when I worked at the airport so many years ago, and through a series of filing for bankruptcy over the years, they have done nothing to improve this rating. It makes me wonder how this company is still in business. It is just another company that I will avoid in the future because of days like this.
John Collings 