The departure monitors said I had two hours until my delayed flight departed, so I sought dinner. It was 9:55pm and the restaurants were closing. I settled on McDonalds because a line of people indicated McDonalds was still serving. I waited in line for 10 minutes until a McDonalds woman literally yelled at me, “We’re closed!” Just like that, no food, no warning, and no sympathetic tone. Shame on me for assuming that a line of people receiving burgers meant they were open.

 

So I headed back to my gate with a three day old salad from a magazine vendor. Upon arrival, the “Boise” signage at the gate now read “Cincinnati.” The departure screens no longer even listed Boise as a destination. My flight ceased to exist and there was no status.

 

A three hour line to speak to a live person at Customer Service wasn’t appealing, so I found a kiosk with a hotline to United. My flight was indeed cancelled and I was rebooked for the next morning.

 

I had turned down my Chicago friend’s offer to stay at his place hours earlier, so I sought lodging. United promised hotel support if I called Customer Relations. Phone calls were transferred from department to department, voice recognition menus failed, then failed again, then failed again, and ultimately no person could tell me yes or no on airline support.

 

So I gave up and headed to baggage claim to find a hotel hotline. That was a nice system, but neither the hotel staff on the phone nor any airport signage had an indicator on where to pick up the hotel shuttles. 20 minutes of walking around O’Hare finally revealed the pickup area. After waiting another 20 minutes for the shuttle at Door 2 (as instructed by the hotel), I called the hotel again and they said to wait at Door 1. So I moved to Door 1, waited 15 minutes, and then someone said that my hotel picks up at Door 3. Meanwhile I asked every Holiday Inn bus that came by if they were my Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn Select, Holiday Inn Suites, Holiday Inn Holiday Inn.  All different hotels, all the same signage, and mass confusion.

 

When I finally got to the hotel, there were two people working the check in, phone reservations, phone “directions” to the shuttles, wake up calls, and food sales... with about 100 people in line with blood boiling. The check-in process took 45 minutes for me and I was third in line.

 

These are just the highlights of my last 24 hours and I could add even more frustrating details. The point I want to make is that these were all customer service failures that could have been avoided. Leave the flight on the monitors with the word “cancelled” (or better yet, send email and text message notification with rebooking details), give restaurant managers the authority (and incentive) to stay open late when thousands of unanticipated, hungry customers are stranded in the airport, train staff to always be courteous to make the delivery of bad news sympathetic, make signage clear and easy to understand, anticipate evenings when an airport hotel is going to be swamped and allow for backup staff to be called in. These are easy and cheap measures to dramatically change customer experiences.

 

These would have been opportunities for those businesses to improve, but as the recipient of the experience I had no confidence that my effort in relaying my thoughts to the leaders would ever make it to them or have an impact on their businesses. So that, in my opinion, is the ultimate failure: No feedback loop and no effort to improve.

 

At Fisher’s I hope the feedback loop is clear and that our customers feel like our leadership is accessible and that we care about taking our levels of service to new heights. We still deliver bad customer experiences and likely will always stub our toes on occasion, but these are massive opportunities to improve and continue to differentiate. 

 

PS: I wrote this blog from Chicago... when I finally got to Boise, my bags didn’t make it.