Chris Heuer's Insytes

Plain and simple. I met the CEO on a flight a few months back when he was dealing with all the BS, and he seemed like a nice guy, but our experience with them over the past few hours leaves no doubt that they just don’t get it.

Kristie bought a couple of tickets on US Airways for us to go to her friend’s wedding and we ended up changing flights and cancelling those tickets. So now I need to fly to DC and we just wanted to use the credit (about $600 less change fees) to buy the new ticket. On the phone with Orbitz, they wanted $130 change fee per ticket. We were just trying to buy the new ticket. They decided to release the ticket to US Airways, so we got on the phone with them. I am a gold member with US Airways, so there should not have been any problems really – seems straightforward right?

We just spent the last hour on the phone with them, most recently speaking with Hernalyn (ID #2HS), supposedly a supervisor in their customer service department. She seems to think that there is no one above her in that department, so she has the final say for the entire airline regarding their policy.

Here is the deal: The original trip we wanted credit on was booked for Kristie and I as 2 tickets. Kristie merely wanted to apply the credit from the money she spent on them to the purchase of my new flight, but they would only let us re-issue the one ticket that was made in my name and would not apply the credit from the other ticket. This would mean she was stuck with that credit for her prior ticket because she has no plans for any other travel which would use this. Regardless, to us it is very simple, we have a credit with the airline for tickets that were cancelled and we want to use it.

To them, this one transaction, on one credit card does not equal one credit, but 2 cancelled tickets that can only be used for 2 more tickets in the names of each people. So if Kristie and I were to break up (we’re not) this would mean she would never be able to use the credit for the tickets. This is a silly policy and it is anti-consumer, perhaps even reason for a lawsuit.

At least now I understand why they are in bankruptcy and having such difficulty, apparently US Airways sucks so badly at understanding CUSTOMER SERVICE that they forget who the customer is and who they are supposed to be servicing. Why is it that most major corporations have customer service departments that are designed to frustrate their customers and prevent them from getting the monies they rightly deserve. I won’t get into the problems we had with Cingular here, but it really does show why corporations are perceived in such a bad light and why customer service reps are getting a reputation that is actually lower than that of a used car salesman.

BTW – Hernalyn did not care that we were not satisifed at the end of the call, she did not care if we blogged about this to the world, she did not care if we ever flew US Airways again and she did not care if we influenced the businesses with which we were involved to never use US Airways either. In short, they don’t care about keeping their customers in the customer service department, even though a large portion of their marketing budget is spent on keeping customers happy. So one phone call with a $20/hour supervisor ends up costing them a couple of thousand dollars a year from our lost business and even more from those people we know.

Not very smart. I predict they won’t be around very much longer, so that gold status I have in the frequent flyer program means nothing. I guess I will just fly American or JetBlue now. So, if you are from US Airways and you are reading this, I have a goatse for you to look at…

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