Rail Air

There are good reasons for passengers to receive less than comprehensive information. One of these is unrealistic expectations. Is it possible to manage both information and expectations better – and if so, how?

During the volcanic ash cloud emergency, no-one knew more than about 8 hours in advance what the situation was going to be – whether planes were going to be allowed to fly and where to. So for a passenger to ask, “When are you going to fly me home?” and expect a firm answer was just not realistic. Reasonable to the passenger, maybe, but unrealistic.

Similarly during the recent winter weather problems, affecting airports from Moscow to Chicago, people wanted to know when they would be able to fly. No-one knew when the snow would stop: no-one knew when it could be cleared enough for planes to move around the airfield safely and take off – especially if the destination airport was also affected.

Planes need to move away from stands so that inbound planes can take their place, unload, load and take off again. This smoothly choreographed plan is blindingly obvious to those in the industry: it can be unrealised, unappreciated, by passengers.

Delayed passengers can understandably get annoyed and frustrated: they can want to take out their annoyance and frustration on someone. Airline and airport staff, equally understandably, do not wish to be assaulted – verbally or otherwise – when trying to deal with passengers.

It is very difficult to deal with a crowd of stressed passengers individually. Each member of the crowd demands priority, and can be reluctant to allow a member of staff to give one passenger a full answer before moving on and handing their own questions. One person trying to help can be mobbed, and the information given to one passenger in a crowd can be passed on, distorted and wrongly assumed to apply to all.

Hence the reports of staff taking shelter behind remote check-in desks, or even going into hiding – and the reports that, “There were no staff around to help me”.

Allied to this is the willingness of passengers to assume that anyone in uniform knows everything! They don’t, of course: even well-informed airport employees are often unable to answer ticketing questions, for example.

A big component of the problem is the load factor issue. Planes are 80% - 90% full, on average. So for every 100 seats on an aircraft, there are only 10-20 spare on each flight. If, because of winter weather, a day’s flights are cancelled, it is going to take about a week to catch up. If Monday’s flights are cancelled, Tuesday’s flights can only take Tuesday’s passengers plus 10% of Monday’s, and so on.

So if you were booked to travel on Monday, it could well be Friday before you actually leave – which leads to the associated question of who decides who flies when?

Having been on both sides of this myself – a transport operator with delayed passengers, and a delayed passenger – I appreciate the need for people to be given as much information as possible. Exactly how this should be done in this day and age of social media and the like I do not know, beyond stating that passengers need to be informed where they are and in a way they can accept and understand. Not everyone tweets!

People who know what is going on, people who are told why they cannot fly now, are more likely to be accepting of the problem. However, the problem of how exactly you put across complex issues – like the load factor problem – to a stressed and unsympathetic audience, needs work. A new challenge for the transportation industry, I think!

I hope you enjoyed reading this: I look forward to your feedback.

Andrew