United Airlines

Traveling is an experience that everyone has to do and tends to not enjoy doing. During a plane ride you’re as close as possible to your neighbor passengers and your entire experience can rest on their shoulders. They might smell, have crying kids, constantly move or any other annoying jester that could ruin a nice flight. A company that wants a boost in customers should try and heighten the customer’s flight experience instead of purely trying to make a profit off of it. By doing so you can create a company that customers remember enjoying their flight with and that by itself can put you ahead of competitors. Southwest Airlines is a perfect example of a company that has taken advantage of this airline situation and United Airlines is a perfect example of a company that failed to take advantage.
Southwest Airlines loves to implement different methods to enlighten the flyers experience. For instance, there are documented moments where the flight attendant performs a rap of the safety procedures each person on the plane should follow in emergency situations. He even got the audience to perform a beat and enjoy the song. Something that simple allows the passengers to implant an exciting memory of a traveling experience they actually enjoyed (Baron). This could never happen if Southwest didn’t have employees that enjoyed their job. With happy employees comes happy customers.
The benefits of having employees that enjoy their job is the fact that they feel comfortable with being themselves. They are able to act in ways that many people wouldn’t expect and people tend to find new things fairly exciting. With the flight attendant example it is obvious that both the employees and passengers are having an exciting time listening to the “bland” safety instructions being spiced up and received in a lively manor.
United Airlines needs to drastically improve their customer service and policies. Their CEO Jeff Smisek even agrees with it since he stated “we operate really inefficiently today” and that “our customer service historically since the merger has not been as good as it should be (Bachman).” There have been way too many incidents where the United Airlines failed to confront a customer effectively through reimbursement. The most famous example would be the singer/songwriter Dave Carroll who made the song “United Breaks Guitars.” Unfortunately for United, the cost savings of “$1,200 cost United Airlines 10,772,839 negative views on Youtube (Wilson).” It is hard to say how many customers United Airlines could have saved by simply paying the singer $1,200 dollars.
United Airlines just fails in the policy department, they’re just not lenient enough on certain situations. Even though Dave Carroll failed to send a complaint about his guitar within 24 hours United Airlines should have allowed a change in their policy. A tight time frame like 24 hours is to short, many travelers might not check certain equipment to see if it is damaged. The policies United Airlines has in place should not try to screw the customer over but try to offer the customer a chance to be reimbursed for any possible error that might have hindered their experience with flying United Airlines. The point of services is to bring the customers back not send them away.
In order for United Airlines to change their services and get back customers they must first change their image. It will be a big step in the redesign process but it should enable United to become a top contender in the airline industry. First they must publically announce “we messed up” and it might be an awesome strategy to make fun of their own company for making their mistakes. If a company can make fun of themselves and announce that they plan to change then consumers should gain respect for that company because they had the gall to lift the curtain and share what they have been doing wrong and how they plan to fix it. A successful company that has announced their mistakes in the