Why airlines and other companies should stop treating customers like naughty children

Being something of a frequent flyer, I’ve seen the most ridiculous practises at check-in. Petty, they are. Consistent, they’re not. On one occasion, a Jet2 check-in assistant made a fuss about 500g and sat there weighing my purse, passport and youngest son’s die-cast cars (“ooh – are you going to deprive him Lightning McQueen?”). Passengers whose scales are out of kilter can end up paying through the nose. If their cabin bag exceeds 10kg or is the wrong dimensions for a particular airline, they can be forced to assign the bag to the hold for an inflated fee, while excess weight in a hold bag can be charged at £10 to £20 per kilo. Or, to avoid excess charges, you might be invited to throw your purse and die-cast cars into the bin.

Meanwhile, where air travel is concerned, it’s perfectly fine to (a) be morbidly obese and carry more weight on to the plane than anybody else, without baggage even entering into the equation; or (b) stashing your personal items in your pockets and carrying them into the cabin that way. The Rufus Roo excelled at the latter feat, as I discovered at Flybe check-in. Not an eyelid was raised at the ‘obese’ passenger approaching the desk with a bulging travel jacket stuffed with clothing and books. Rufus Roo: 1. Naff check in rules: 0.

I remember the era when flying economy class gave passengers a free hold baggage allowance and a complementary in-flight snack and drink from a helpful stewardess. The need to fear the arbitrary wrath of check-in assistants, and the practise of wearing one’s luggage on one’s person, was strictly not necessary in those ‘halcyon days’.

Now, we have descended into a less polite era where the customer definitely isn’t king. The customer is, indeed, just a wallet to be emptied. On top of the stated fare for a “bargain” or “sale” flight, we must put up with a plethora of ‘hidden extras’ designed to relieve unsuspecting folks of their funds.

As many UK consumers are well-aware (we’re not that blind or daft, airlines!), sneaky tricks include: unexpected “booking fees” of around £6 per sector (one way flight), as if it were a Mean Fiddler music event; exorbitant credit card processing fees (about to be outlawed by the EU); fees for online check-in levied by forcing passengers to select and pay for a seat before they can print a boarding pass; fees for failing to check-in online or print a boarding pass. Michael O’Leary of Ryainair even suggested charging passengers to use the on-board toilets, although this turned out to be one of his notorious PR stunts on “a slow news day”.

I feel that airlines treat passengers, whose cabin bags are ‘non-compliant’, like naughty children. Of course, there must be some rules to prevent a free-for all in the cabin, with huge bags rolling in the aisles and causing a health and safety hazard. However, the attitude is more akin to how a teacher would treat naughty school children who have forgotten their PE kit or have inserted a selection of rude comics into their school bag instead of their school books.

The prevailing attitude at airport check-in is money-grabbing at best (Ryanair even has baggage handlers on commission to spot ‘borderline’ cabin bags at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport) and inhumane at worst. In many cases, the passengers – paying customers, who should be “king” – are treated as if they are stupid. It would be nice (although extremely unlikely) to see at least one airline fly back to the old standard of wooing the customers and making the experience genuinely pleasant for them.

And it’s not just airlines. The situation in the air industry mirrors the standards of customer service in the UK as a whole. The rot is endemic: rude telephone operatives who don’t care if they find a ‘solution’ and would rather end the call so they can get on with clipping their nails, eating their sandwich or whatever; companies who still shunt paying customers round call centres in Delhi, even though they must know by now that we hate it; operatives suggesting that the customer is wrong (this often seems to occur with telecoms companies); and tech support staff who are reading off pre-set scripts and will not stray off the script, no matter how ridiculous it becomes.

Cue recent phone conversation with a technical support person at a major laptop manufacturer: Me: “I’ve taken the laptop out of the box and the screen is damaged. It has large, vertical rows of dead pixels across it.”

Operative: “Can you boot it up and press F12. It might be a software problem.”

Me: “It has dead pixels. I can see them. I know exactly what they look like.”

Operative: “It might be the cable or power supply.”

Me: “It has dead pixels. I can even see the damage on the screen when it’s turned off.”

Operative: “Have you tried plugging it into an external monitor to see if the problem’s still there.”

Me: “IT HAS DEAD PIXELS.”

Operative: “I’m sure you know better than us…”

And that came in a week where Barclays shunted me round it’s Delhi call centre for an hour, with no resolution to the problem of a cash point swallowing my debit card because (as I eventually found out, three days later) it had a damaged chip and was remotely blocked without anyone informing me. Nobody in Delhi knew that, or could source the relevant information.

Thinking back over the last 12 months, the roll-call of dishonourable mentions for shoddy call centre ‘help’ includes: Sky TV, o2, Vodafone, Co-op Bank, Jet2, Thomson Airlines… and I’m just one UK consumer, out of millions.

If we can’t be treated as “king”, surely the minimum requirements are good manners and a willingness to help customers who are paying to phone the call centre which, if we’re really, really lucky, might not be in Delhi. After all, we are spending money with these companies. We deserve to be treated in a better way.

I think consumers need to raise their voices more loudly against companies that aren’t serving us well. Or, as one of my friends who runs an online retail business predicts, we can all start hand-picking goods from all over the world – the US or, most notably, China where everything is made anyway – to get the best deal and cut out the “middlemen”. Shame we can’t do that with our mobile phone contract, broken laptop or missing bank card.

At least, with airlines, we can vote with our seats and avoid those that are clearly insulting our intelligence and ripping us off with the most miserly baggage practises and meanest hidden charges. Maybe, one day, a more reasonable and customer-friendly era will prevail as a kick-back against the present nosedive into treating customers like prize chumps.

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