Airline service satisfaction hits 7-year low

By Tom Stundza -- Purchasing, 5/21/2008 10:43:00 AM

Airline passengers are more dissatisfied with customer service than they have been since the last low point in satisfaction in 2001, according to an annual survey released Tuesday by the University of Michigan. In fact, the industry's overall scores dropped for the third straight year among the 26,000 people who responded to the survey during the first quarter of this year.

While unhappiness with airlines is nothing new, this year's survey produced “really dismal numbers,” according to Claes Fornell, a University of Michigan business professor and director of the research center that compiled the data. “There's no other industry anywhere that has so many basic mishaps in terms of not delivering the basics,” he says. The airlines “are supposed to deliver passengers with their luggage to a particular destination within a certain timeframe, and they frequently fail to do that.”

Asked by the media why scores have worsened so significantly, the professor says airlines' management has to be blamed despite some factors beyond their control such as higher jet-fuel costs and congested airports. But passengers also are not blameless, according to Fornell. The public buys primarily on price, and very little else, he says. “The result of that is very low service and a business model of cost-cutting that really leaves no one happy, certainly not the businesses, the shareholders or the flying public.”
Fornell add it is worrisome that the four big airlines looking to consolidate — Delta with Northwest, as agreed to last month, and United and US Airways — are at the bottom of the industry in customer satisfaction. "When it comes to mergers, combining two negatives doesn't make a positive," he says.