I'm mystified, and I smell obfuscation. Or at the very least, total confusion.
By now, everybody knows of the JetBlue debacle. The airline kept planes full of people on iced runways for up to 10 hours last week and canceled up to 1,000 flights during and in the week following a nasty winter storm that blew through the northeast, particularly JFK airport, the airline's hub. There were reports of parents running out of diapers for their children and being forced to tear up clothing to make impromptu nappies. The planes ran out of food, the toilets clogged up. Some passengers and members of the news media are starting to utter phrases like "kidnapping" and "unlawful imprisonment."
It has taken the airline a week to get back on schedule. Estimates regarding how much it will cost the airline reach up to $30 million in refunds and vouchers. The chairman of Jet Blue, David Neeleman, has done everything short of getting on his knees and weep and beat his breast in his groveling apologies, and the airline has proposed a Customer Bill of Rights so future nightmares of this magnitude don't happen.
But what I'm wondering is this: all the news articles mention the weather, the tarmac, the planes, and FAA rules that disallow flight crews from flying for longer than a certain amount of hours, limiting the amount of flights that can take off.
But surely, this being a storm beyond anyone's control, why did only Jet Blue stumble so badly? If those reasons listed above were the only reasons, all the airlines that regularly fly out of JFK should be in the same boat.
But they're not.
Which implies internal management/customer service problems? But nobody's talking too much about those yet.
The airline acknowledged that it failed to cancel flights in advance, when they knew the storm was approaching, which left an abnormal amount of planes grounded at JFK Airport in New York and its reservation system hopelessly overloaded. But surely all the other airlines had hopelessly overloaded reservation systems, too.
The reason I'm so interested is that Jet Blue used to be ranked number one in terms of customer service. Those of us who have high hopes for the home agent model are (or have been) pleased by this news: Jet Blue's customer service agents are entirely home-based. The company's high ranking in customer service seemed to vindicate and recommend the home agent model.
Now this. How do you go from the top to the pit in the cellar with Precious in one day?
Did something break?
An article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette states that, "JetBlue...discovered that its 2,000 reservation agents, many of whom work at home in the Salt Lake City area, could not handle the flood of angry calls as the company canceled flights on Saturday, Sunday and Monday."
Aha. Why not?
The Post Gazette article goes on to say, "What made the situation even worse is that JetBlue could not re-direct passengers to other airlines. So-called 'inter-lining' arrangements are expensive to arrange with rival carriers and not typically offered by low-cost operators such as JetBlue."
Aha again. Low-cost solutions, just like budget airlines, work great when everything goes right. But cut too many corners behind the scenes, and when the proverbial shit hits the fan (at this point, it's hard not to conjure up images from the movie Airplane, but that's not important right now), the flimsy structure falls apart.
Will Jet Blue recover? Most certainly. Will things have to change, including its customer service processes and its disaster recovery methodologies? Also most certainly. Will it be quite as cheap as it was before? The money's going to have to come from somewhere to improve the back-office structure so such a thing doesn't happen again.
Looks like Jet Blue picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.
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