Letter to AirTran [1/2]
7th September, 2008I sent off a couple of letters today. Here’s one I sent to Bob Fornaro, President of AirTran Airways. I will post any response I get from AirTran.
Mr. Fornaro,
Lose my bag once, shame on you.
Lose my bag twice, shame on me.
That’s right. On my last two trips with AirTran, my bags have been lost.
The first trip was Atlanta to New York/LaGuardia on September 2, 2007 when I was moving to New York City. I had paid an extra $50 to bring a third bag, which happened to contain the sheets and pillows I intended on sleeping on that night. Why did I pay an extra $50, when the bag never even made it on the plane, or even to New York on the same day as myself? When I asked for my money back at the very least, the manager flatly refused.
The second trip was New York/LaGuardia to Newport News, VA on July 18, 2008, when I was traveling to Williamsburg, VA for a friend’s wedding the next morning. On this trip, you lost my only bag, which contained all of my clothes. I couldn’t very well go to a wedding in shorts, a t-shirt, and flip flops, and I couldn’t be sure when my bag would arrive the next morning, so I was forced to travel the 20 miles back to the airport at 1am.
The AirTran representative I dealt with at PHF was congenial and gave me a $25 credit, but that’s not enough for me to consider flying with you in the near future. Not by a long shot. That does not even cover the $50 I paid for you to lose my bag in September 2007, or the exorbitant price of gas I had to pay to get back to the airport in July 2008.
The essential problem is that you have become unreliable, while simultaneously raising your prices to the levels of other airlines. In fact, because I have to pay for such conveniences as sitting in an exit row, I end up paying more than I would on a similar flight on, say, Delta. Plus, they have the added bonus of not regularly losing my luggage.
You have left me no reason to fly with you.
While I have your undivided attention, I wanted to bring one more issue to light. On the aforementioned LGA-PHF flight, it took me some 30 minutes to check in, even though there were several AirTran employees assisting customers and not very many customers in line. The employees were extraordinarily slow and rather surly when I finally made it to the front. I suggest sending spies to LaGuardia’s Terminal D or Atlanta’s South Terminal to find out how a 21st century check-in system works.
Tags: airlines, airtran, corporate, customerservice, letter
