What’s it called when you think you “know something,” but really have no idea about what’s going on behind the scenes? Oh, right, arrogance.
The baggage claim agent usually has no direct power to fix it, you’re right. But they are certainly empowered to find out what happened and what the quickest way to fix it is. At the airline for which I work, we have a large department dedicated to dealing with pilferaged bag claims. I can’t think of any major US carrier that doesn’t. If you think they sit around all day with their thumbs up their asses not caring about our mishandled baggage ratio, the number of pilferage and damage claims, and whether there are some dishonest luggage handlers, then you’re not only arrogant, but also ignorant.
Like I said, not every frontline employee is up to the challenge. Rest easy knowing that most won’t make it very long in the job. But for those who do bust their asses, research and follow up with customers, and STILL get the asshole treatment, there’s no excuse for being a jerk. None. In most cases of customers being entitled dicks, they get just a few seconds into the conversation before deciding which of those categories the employee they’re dealing with falls in.
And not all businesses are going to make sure their employees are doing their jobs, either. For those, you can vote with your feet.
Good Lord, What airports are you going to?!? :eek:
My wife and I had our checked bags go missing when we returned from Turks and Caicos. The bags made into the US just fine, we saw them in ATL as we transferd from international to domestic. It turned out they got left behind due to wieght limits. It took four trips to the airport counter and over a week to get both bags back. Her bag actually got deliver to the airport the next morning and was sitting in thier office the FIRST time I checked back with the airline, but it took two more trips to the desk for them to find it in thier office. My bag took 8 days to get from ATL to Iowa. With both bags Delta did not deliver them and did not let us know they arrived.
When we arrived we had filed a missing bag claim, but dispite haveing paperwork with a claim number it originally “was not in thier system” and I ended up having to redo the paper work when I checked with them the next day. If we had not kept hounding the desk people at the airline counter i don’t think we would ever have gotten them back.
No, actually there isn’t. Why would you think there is? You have a right to expect them to do the best they can. You don’t have a guarantee that nothing will go wrong. I’m not saying there is no room for improvement in baggage handling by airlines – pretty massive improvement could be done – but that doesn’t mean you should barf your bile all over people who are clearly not personally responsible for whatever your problem is. You are swearing at a person, not a company.
No. If you don’t like how they do business, take your business elsewhere. You have no right to any particular response except for one that is polite and responsive. If the response is not in fact responsive (“I don’t know what to tell you”) you certainly would be justified in demanding to speak to someone who can answer your questions. That still is not a license to be abusive.
Angry, sure. Abusive, no. No employee of any agency should be expected to tolerate being sworn at or abused. Any customer who has so little self-control or common decency as to engage in such behavior can hit the bricks, AFAIAC.
I wouldn’t tolerate being sworn at was I was a customer service employee and I can honestly say that in a pretty varied career of dealing with pissy customers, I never once had a manager who expected me to. I never tolerated that when I was a manager and in fact once threw a bunch of drunks out of a Pizza Hut for becoming abusive of me and a waitress after she stopped serving them beer at my direction.
I don’t take much shit. I don’t expect anyone working for me to do so, either.
If an airline tells me that I have to check luggage, then they are responsible for said luggage, and I don’t give a flying fuck what their disclaimer says. If luggage that is my property is obviously broken into and items are missing, then something has been stolen from me, and that is a crime. I have a right to know who stole from me, because I’m going to press charges. I want the airline that hired the thief to give me the information I need to so. I don’t want a damaged luggage form that is designed to protect the airlines as much as possible.
But they don’t tell you that you have to check luggage. It’s not like they’re making you take your luggage at all; you’re free to fly without it. If they decided you couldn’t check anything, or couldn’t carry anything on, or had to fly in your underwear, those would be the conditions you would have to accept, or you could choose not to do business with them. So the fact that you don’t give a flying fuck what the disclaimer says doesn’t render it ineffective.
This is not to say having stuff stolen from your bag is not a big deal; it obviously is. But how is that a defense for abusing the employees?
You can escalate the situation. You can make whatever declarations you feel you need to, and you can take whatever action you feel is necessary, including filing a police report and documenting your requests and their refusals. None of that requires you to call any one an asshole.
We are the airlines. If we want to strip search you and leave you on the tarmac naked in a strange city, we’ll do that, in the name of security.
You have no right to your luggage.
You have no right to a refund of your ticket price.
You have no right to actually get to your destination.
You have no right to food or hotel vouchers.
We don’t even have to tell you where your naked ass is, in case you got anywhere.
This ticket was sold for entertainment purposes only.
I really feel that I must address this - AirCanada (who SUCK!!!) have an official no-escalation policy. What that means is that if you call, or rant at a ticket agent they are NOT ALLOWED to transfer the call (or person) to a manager, even if you ask them in plain language.
My SIL worked there for a few years - she started at Canadian (which was a nice company) and when they were bought out by AC she transferred over. The company is shit-tastic on pretty well every level, treat their employees terribly and deserve to have gone out of business years ago. I don’t know who in Ottawa is getting their dick sucked so that abomination of corporate shittyness is still in business, but they are.
When confronted with a customer such as Uzi, screaming, yelling, calling the company stupid, the clerk stupid, everyone in the area stupid, my very Japanese SIL will bow very deeply and say “Thankyouverymuch.” Heh - I guess it shuts people up pretty quickly.
It did prepare her for her new job - she now works for Revenue Canada as an auditor. Heh.
But it’s kind of right, right? They are selling a service. They can sell a shitty service because they own the planes. I am not saying the airlines don’t have us all, male and female, by our collective testicles and ovaries; they do. We want what they are selling and we don’t think we can live without it.
Then I have the right to tell them directly that their service is shitty, and if it is official company policy not to pass the complaints up the chain of command, then the only representative available just better suck it up. If a manager is available to give the heave-ho to belligerent customers, then a manager is available to step up and take care of complaints. I am going to go to where the buck stops, and if the buck stops with you, take responsibility or get another job.
Bingo! Again, it isn’t hard to keep track of bags and people. We have the technology, but the have to utilize it for it to work.
Actually, you would want to work for me because I would ensure that our company did what they should be doing (taking care of the customer) so that it would be unlikely you would ever be yelled at by an irate customer. “Sorry, sir, we will do our best to find your luggage and deliver it directly to your door as soon as we do so. Any special instructions? Okay, here is a coupon for free lounge access the next time you fly and a $100 off your next ticket, no conditions. It was OUR fault. Again, sorry for the inconvenience”
Your attitude seems to be, “Well, que sera sera. What can you do?”, and throw up your hands saying a customer shouldn’t be upset over lost luggage and willing to give them the ol’ heave ho if they are.
Frankfurt.
“Sir, what are those?” Me looking down, “My balls?”. He checks <shudder>.
No, I am not exceptionally endowed or was wearing spandex.
Whoa! Where did I ever say I ever yelled at anyone? I understand why someone would yell and am looking at it from that person’s pov, but I haven’t ever done so nor would I. You expect to yell at someone and then get your bag back? Geez, it would be like yelling at a waiter before you got your food. I ain’t stupid.
Or . . . third option . . . I tell you to take your business elsewhere when I find you’ve abused my employees. Then you can work your abusive way through all the airlines until your options for a trip to South America are to drive to Miami and then swim.
ETA: And I never said you could not tell them their service is shitty; you can and should register your complaint in the strongest terms, so long as you are not abusing the employees.
Except that taking care of employees is a better business model than taking care of customers at employeees’ expense. (Assuming you have to choose one or the other, which should be rare; you should do both.) If your employees loathe your customers, they will not serve them well.
I never said this. I said I don’t think anyone has the right to swear at or otherwise be abusive to employees. The fact that I’m an agent of a company you happen to be mad at doesn’t give you the right to call me names or scream at me. This is especially true when you know damn well the poor peon you’re screaming at didn’t cause the problem and cannot fix it.
They lost my guest’s luggage. Prior to that they lost my guest (bouncing between Montreal airports while trying to make a Paris Montreal Toronto connection). Prior to that, they lost my grandmother (ended up in Florida on a Toronto Fredericton flight). This progression indicates that they are improving. :dubious:
I did have one very sweet moment, however, when while watching my plane’s baggage being loaded via a converyor, I saw my big green barrel pack roll from the top of the converyor all the way down it, and knock the bagage person flat onto the ground. My satisfaction did not last, however, for that flight included a flight attendant climbing on my lap to get at the overhead storage compartment, one of the meal selections giving a couple of dozen people the shits (causing a multi-hour line up for the washrooms, and stinking up the entire cabin horrridly), and the VCR player catching on fire. The return trip was less eventful – the plane needed repairs, but no one told the attendants in the terminal, who late at night simply turned off the lights in that arm of the terminal, locked the doors, and went home, while we passengers were left laying about in the dark until the next morning.
And folks wonder why I prefer to drive whenever practicable.
What the fuck good is it to register complaints that don’t go anywhere? Let me ask you, if the only option you had to get somewhere was to fly AirCanada and you had a legitimate complaint, what would you do?
Since AC has very bad customer service, and since it is extremely reluctant to let customers speak with anyone other than ground level staff (it took police involvement to get them to find my grandmother whom they had put on the wrong flight), then one reasonable approach would be to hit the airline in the pocket book by reducing the efficiency of ground level staff by tying them up with complaints, and by causing higher than acceptable ground level staff turnover due to the stress of dealing with complaints, until it becomes more cost effective to provide reasonable customer service than to keep having to hire new ground level staff to deal with very poor customer service.
To document what you’ve done when you are writing your letter to the company’s president, or the better business bureau, or the Canadian equivalent of the DOT, or file your lawsuit. What the fuck good is it to scream at people who can’t escalate your concern anyway? What’s your intention – to have security called?
I guess I’d fly it, shitty service and all, since you’ve hypothesized I have no other choice. Beyond that, to get attention or register a complaint, I would do everything I could that did not involve abusing the employees. I’m not much of a screamer; I don’t find it gets me anywhere. And since I don’t tolerate being screamed at myself, I have no expectation anyone else will stand there and take it either.
To everyone (because I’ve lost track of exactly who said what in all the back-and-forth posting that’s been going on) who feels that it is there inalienable right to be abusive to the person at the baggage claim help desk: Has it ever occurred to you that they are there to help you deal with a situation, and that you owe them the courtesy of allowing them to attempt to do their job before you start screaming and swearing at them? Yes, I understand that you may be tired and frustrated, but walking up to someone who is in no way responsible for your problem and treating them like shit before they have had a chance to help you is the height of…oh, what’s that word? …assholery.
I have had a (very) few problems with lost or damaged luggage. My response was to walk up to the help desk, calmly and rationally explain my problem, listen to the person who was there to help me explain what the proper procedure was, and allow them to do there job without being treated like they were personally responsible for everything that has ever gone wrong with my life to that point.
Until Westjet entered the fray, AC was the only carrier that flew from my city Toronto International. The only option was a 1400 KM drive.
When Westjet arrived, it offered, and continues several years later to offer, flights to the provincial capital approximately five times less expensive that AC did. AC has dropped its prices due to the competition, but having ripped off the people of my city for so many years, and having such god awful customer service, particularly when it comes to lost luggage, folks around here only fly AC if they can not fit into the Westjet schedule.
When AC starts treating its customers with respect, it will start receiving respect. Until then, if it’s ground level staff do not like the shit customers serve them, they can move on to better employers.
