Virgin Atlantic Sucks (Part 4 of 4)

Today brought some good news from Virgin Atlantic. Apparently, they found my girlfriend's luggage and would deliver it. Can't complain too much about that. Unfortunately the suitcase just showed up now at 6:30 PM. I say unfortunately because she left on another flight to see visit her parents for the Fourth of July week at 4 PM.

I have to say, 48 hours to return a lost bag is not the worst record in the world, but that does not excuse the customer service that my girlfriend received over the last couple days. It's nice that they found the suitcase and returned it, but it would have been a lot nicer if they could have pretended to care about the inconvenience it caused.

Virgin Atlantic could have done some small things to make this experience a lot better. For example, offer some sort of parking voucher or pass so that I didn't have to pay an extra $8 for the hour and a half that I had to wait around in vain.

• Or offer $25 towards some clean clothes. Something that shows that this is not business as usual for your company.

• Or have some people on the phone that don't lie through their teeth to customers (my girlfriend was promised four different times that she would receive a call back within the hour - it NEVER once happened).

• How about having a manager on staff? Once the call center person actually said "Well, this call center is based in India and it's 3 AM here, so we don't have a manager." Locating your call center in India is a business decision you made, it shouldn't effect the level of service we receive. What are we supposed to do, wait until 1 AM on the east coast to call India to try to catch a manager?

• Hire more call center employees! I don't care where they are located, so long as I never hear the words "We are experiencing an abnormally high call volume." Bullshit. I'm going to just call bullshit on that recording. Call volume can't be abnormally high all the time, that's just normal call volume and you're hoping that we'll hang up and use your worthless website instead.

Overall, I'm just tired of companies trying to avoid actually interacting with their customers or meeting the needs of their customers. Especially airlines. It's as if they have completely forgotten that we are contracting a service from them, the transportation of a person and a some baggage from one point to another. If they fail to live up to their side of the contract of course we're going to be pissed.

In a world where FedEx can deliver a package to any address in the country on the next day and give me real-time tracking updates, how is it at all acceptable that airlines can completely lose a bag for 24 hours or more? We have bar codes and hand held scanners, why isn't there a system of scanning bags every time they move from one place to another?

All the things I've suggested are not incredibly difficult to implement. However, I doubt we see anything like that any time soon. As long as companies can look around the industry and say "we're not really that much worse than everyone else," there is little impetus for change. It takes guts to do your job well, to do it better than everyone else, and I don't see any airlines demonstrating that kind of will to excel. They're too busy trying to cut another inch out of the legroom in coach.