Why do Low Cost Airlines Hate their Passengers (and What Do We Do About it)?

Mandatory reading for setting up shop as a low cost carrier in Australia, apparently. ©

It’s all over the web. Absolute horror stories of passengers on low cost (and sometimes even not low cost, but just struggling) airlines around the world being treated like total crap...

Last year, it was United Airlines, its baggage handlers notoriously caught throwing expensive guitars around, breaking them, then denying responsibility, only to be pwned by the guitars’ owner, who carried out a promise to write, record and post on YouTube three songs about his experiences that each drew millions of viewers and resulted in groveling mea culpas from the airline.

It’s gotten so bad in the United States that, thanks to the efforts of customer groups like Kate Hanni’s FlyersRights.org, the Obama Administration finally passed regulations imposing massive fines on domestic US carriers for keeping passengers stuck on planes on the tarmac for more than a couple of hours. (This followed incidents in which passengers have actually died, and others made ill, after being held on the tarmac on planes, for hours on end, without any possibility of disembarking, and often with no airconditioning, non-functioning toilets, and no food or water). There’s even now a popular blog on dreadful airline experiences (Flightsfromhell.com).

But it’s not only the United States where the behaviour, mostly of low cost carriers, has gone dramatically south.  In Europe, RyanAir - whose CEO Michael O'Leary is notoriously unapologetic about his apparent aim of making his ultra low budget carrier not only ultra cheap but as unpleasant as possible – recently saw a revolt by some 20 passengers (all booted off the plane, ultimately) for complaining about the treatment of fellow passengers whom the airline slugged with extra luggage charges.

In Australia, with its ultra competitive air market thanks to an effectively total ‘open skies’ airline policy, standards of low cost carriers as a whole may be worst of all.

The stories are truly staggering: upscale traditional domestic carrier Qantas’ low budget arm Jetstar is aggressively taking over many of Qantas’ domestic routes – and service standards seem to be getting worse in lockstep as reviews on our site will attest to.

Virgin Airlines, beloved in Australia on its initial launch not only for its cheap prices but for efficient operation and its (inspired by US carrier Southwest) good humoured friendliness, has also seemingly descended into enthusiastic rudeness and incompetence if the reviews on Customer Underground are any indication.

But Tiger Airlines (Singapore Airlines’ Oz-based low cost arm) is the true war criminal here in Australia: the recipient of innumerable complaints about highly suspect customer service practices; apparently deliberately slow refunds of promised moneys to passengers; and the placing of extremely odd roadblocks in the path of passengers wanting to complain or seek such refunds, practices so extreme one could be forgiven for thinking they are part of a deliberate attempt not to refund moneys owed. On this site, there have been reports of passengers calling up about delayed refunds actually being hung up on as soon as the airline discovered the reason for the call; and of one passenger being made to wait 7 months for a refund of a few hundred dollars and then only because he wouldn’t give up hounding the airline. Tiger appears to know it’s up to no good, too – several passengers have reported receiving immediate refunds on taking matters with up an Australian consumer affairs agency, such as the Department of Fair Trading. Especially because of Tiger Airways, it would seem, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (or ‘ACCC’, our equivalent of the United States’ F.T.C.) has even recently announced an inquiry into the consumer practices, fees and charges of Australian airlines.

And yet, in the last 48 hours, it’s all come to a head with the conduct of Jetstar towards a passenger in Darwin. A nurse by training, she volunteered to come to the aid of another passenger on her flight, who had apparently suffered a heart attack in an onboard bathroom. So intense was her effort to perform CPR on the patient, she broke the capillaries in her face and, on doctor’s recommendation, spent the night in a Darwin hospital. The overnight stay necessitated her having to re-book a different flight home than the one she had paid for. And – you know where this is going – Jetstar tried to make her buy a new airline ticket, because of the terms and conditions of her original ticket.

Eventually, Jetstar relented. But only after an explosion of national outrage. The best Jetstar’s CEO could manage was, apparently, to admit the airline was “not on our best form” in its treatment of this poor woman.

So what’s going on? In the low cost air carrier market, how has ‘cheap’ become synonymous with ‘hostile’, ‘rude’, ‘aggressive’ and in some cases, as we’ve seen, ‘scammy’?

It’s one thing for low cost carriers to impose strict rules – for example, about check-in times - to ensure on-time departures and therefore try to contain airport runway costs (of course, those rules would be much less annoying if the airlines weren’t so very often late in departing because of their own technical problems); one can also understand such airlines charging for many extras beyond the bare ticket (baggage, on board food and drink, headsets, etc.), again in an effort to keep prices down.

But why the overtly terrible service we’re undoubtedly being subjected to?

One explanation may seem attractive – low cost carriers probably don’t pay very well, and are therefore unlikely to attract great staff, but rather staff looking to pay the bills, perhaps take advantage of employee benefits like cheap air travel. Many of them are phoning it in, and simply don’t care about their passengers.

But there’s more to it. More and more, it seems, we’re seeing a split of the airline market in its attitude to passengers – the ones the airlines care about (business travelers; those paying for flexible economy fares on non-low-cost carriers) and those looking to fly as cheaply as possible: who the airlines seem to regard as inherently less deserving of polite treatment. As if their wish for a cheap fare somehow makes them a lower class of person.

And that attitude is unlikely to be coming just from staff – it’s coming from the airlines’ operators and owners: there to make money on the tightest margins possible, and willing to sacrifice customers in the belief that more will replace them on the next flight, also ultimately looking for the cheapest flight available at the expense of decent service.

The really scary thing about the actively hostile attitude of low cost carriers, coming we think from the very top down, towards their passengers, is the dehumanizing effect it’s having on staff working on the ground.

We’re not just seeing the unreasonable enforcement of understandable if strict rules (again, about check-in times, etc.)

We’re seeing, for example in the case of Tiger, active efforts to avoid and perhaps defraud customers with deliberately delayed or unpaid refunds.

And in the case of Jetstar, we’re seeing something even worse – the complete breakdown of basic principles of human decency: understanding, gratitude, compassion (all totally absent in the case of the passenger nurse whom the airline effectively blamed for trying to save the life of a fellow passenger).

Who are the people this airline is hiring, that they would behave that way? Or, more likely, what has the corporate culture of Jetstar done to these staff that it would cross their mind that that was an acceptable way to treat another human being, much less a paying customer?

Most importantly, what can we fellow customers do about it?

We can complain (as many are doing about Tiger Airways, as reported on this site, and is generating some results). We can hope Government agencies like the ACCC in Australia do their job, and impose fines on airlines found to be engaging in illegal behaviour. We can individually refuse to fly the offending airlines (but realizing that many others will continue to put up with dreadful service out of interest or often need to secure the cheapest fare possible).

But none of those things, even combined, feel like they’re going to get the job done.

To me, it feels like nothing will change, or even begin to turnaround, until these low cost carriers respond to the one thing any other industry with a significant customer interface has ever historically responded to: increased Government oversight of their practices.

It’s time, at least in Australia, for two things: a travel industry ombudsman (the PR effect on Australian Telcos – to say nothing of the effect on transparency of charges - of having a Telecommunications Ombudsman to oversee, name and shame ill-behaving teclo companies is becoming significant. Consider Vodafone’s recent dramatic public apology over the implosion of its service).

And, more dramatically, we need a reminder from our Government to airlines granted local carrier licenses in Australia that the Government’s continued authorization of their services, in a market that’s among the world’s most competitive, stable, liberalised and sought-after, is not a foregone conclusion. Maybe it’s time a mandatory code of conduct was set for locally operating airlines, with a proviso that if it’s breached significantly (eg. a number of breaches over a 3 year period), the result will be crushing / bankrupting fines, or, worse, withdrawal of the airline’s license to continue operating.

It’s hard to see anything else that will curb some of the truly appalling excesses in the treatment of customers we’ve been seeing in this country.

Feel free to forward this article to other customers or sites. The more customers who voice their opinions on the subject, the greater the chance of change really beginning in how low cost carriers treat us.

Until then, consider sticking to slightly better performing airlines, like (in Australia) Qantas (at least in my experience) or Southwest (in the United States).  Oh, and maybe give Jetstar a miss if you find yourself needing to fly to Darwin…

What do you think might be a solution? What have your own experiences been? I’d love to know your views in the comments section below (or you can add a review for any of the airlines in this article).