dfdasein Your description of bad treatment is all too familiar. It is my view that this has happened by accident (not this specific trip of course, although included). The carriers - like most companies - have sought to reduce their expenditure to the minimum and outsourcing, code share (not in this case) and hub/spoke ops do that very well.
However, each of those things moves the person dealing with the customer further from the person with responsibility. By lengthening the chain of command, the feed back of negative consequences gets diluted. Since many of the 'managers' did not grow up in the business - they don't know where to look for the bad news. They are dependent on being told bad news but it is no longer in anyone's interest to report bad news. Bad news got outlawed many years ago!!!
One of the great blunders of modern mgmt was to break up chains of command. This was done with the idea that each section/department would do it's very best and so you would improve customer service and reduce monolithical hierarcies. Of course, quite the opposite has happened! I won't bore you with why and how I think that has occurred - in my view it has.
The disconnect in baggage arrangements (discussed currently in other threads) is one of the most visible examples of the broken chain. Nothing can relink the chain of customer service, other than an extreme financial meltdown of the company and a desire (and money) of the owners to rebuild it. This happened to Continental but will not happen at KLM.
Last edited by PAXboy; 4th Jan 2012 at 19:18.
Reason: typographical mistakes