Last year I was on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to San Francisco. Over the Rockies, I was subjected to the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. On numerous occasions it felt like the plane was falling out of the sky. I was gripping my seat, my body was in a sweat, but I wasn’t worried. My peace of mind came from communication with the captain. Before the turbulence, she came on and informed us that there was reported turbulence ahead. She told us that we were going to try and drop altitude to avoid it, but that we may have to pass through some of it. She told us that it was going to be very uncomfortable, but that we were all perfectly safe. She was right, it was very uncomfortable, but she came on again multiple times to reassure us that we were not in danger, everything was under control. Everyone around me was uncomfortable, but managing. A month later I took another flight (with United), and passed through almost equally bad turbulence. This time there was no communication from the captain. And everyone around me was saying their prayers.
This story is not about Air Canada or United, it’s much more human than that. My uncle is a pilot, and I asked him what he would do. Surprisingly, there are no guidelines. Communication is at every pilots’ discretion. He was surprised that I valued the warning, he felt that it was better not to worry people and just get through it as quickly as possible.
On commercial flights, why is the communication from the pilot to the passengers so inconsistent? In what contexts is it best to communicate to passengers? When is it best not to communicate? When communicating, what are the best words to use? These seem like research questions we could gather strong data on.
On flights with no ‘moving maps’, I often wonder what I’m looking at out the window. When the pilot gets on to inform us of our estimated arrival time, our altitude, our speed, why not tell me what I’m looking at out the window? Do I really care about altitude? Do I really know how high 35,000 feet is? Or do I care about what desert/mountain/city I’m flying over?
The onboard airline customer experience is ripe for improvement.
Tags: Air Canada, United
Transport for London have made it mandatory for their Tube drivers to provide updates to passengers within a very short time of being stalled within a tunnel. Their rational is that passengers should be informed as soon as possible about what is going on or they’ll freak out. If passengers freak out then they hate London Underground. The Tube is not unlike an airplane as it is an unnatural situation where people have little control. Well done Transport for London for figuring out the Customer Expereince effects brand perception.
For more try get your hands on ‘Going underground: how ethnography helped the tube tunnel to the heart of it’s brand’ by Ian Pring from the International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 49, no. 6, 2007 (pp 693-705). You have to subscribe to the journal to have a look.
I had a very similar turbulence experience, flying with American Airlines from New York to London. The captain had warned us that we were going to hit turbulence, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how rough it got. I’m not a great flyer at the best of times, but I found it very re-assuring when he came on and calmly told us that we had nothing to worry about and we were through the worst of it.
Conversely, I was flying from London to Dublin after the Omniture Summit last month, and our RyanAir flight was delayed for over an hour without even an acknowledgment that we were departing behind schedule.
Both situations were bad experiences, but a simple message relayed to customers made people feel like the company actually cared about them. It costs nothing to tell your customers what’s going on, surely even RyanAir can grasp the value of communication?
Great communication is free, but very hard. When I worked with London Underground we interviewed staff about moving from analog boards (to update passengers on the state of the network) to digital boards. The latter had so many advantages, real time updating, didn’t suffer from bad handwriting, etc. But the staff in local stations preferred the analog boards and updating customers face to face. The motivations here are complex, but the bottom line is that different members of staff told people different things. And they made up their own rules about what level of detail is appropriate. With thousands of staff across hundreds of stations, consistency of communication is a hard problem.