Customer Satisfaction and No Frills Airlines

People are satisfied with the airlines for a whole number of reasons; reliability, punctuality, easy check-ins, cabin crew service, the quality of how passengers are made to feel and a host of other things. Marrying no frills airlines to high customer satisfaction isn’t easy but some airlines, not many, achieve it. After all, the premis of a no frills airline is that if the fare is cheap enough, passengers come to the airline and nothing else matters.
Well one no frills airline, probably one you haven’t heard of, seems to be working hard to marry the two ideas together. Tiger Airlines is an Australian airline that claims to offer the lowest fares there. But it has another claim as well. It wants to put passengers first in the belief by doing that it can grow its business.
It has set up a new customer services team, it surveys and listens to its passengers and it claims that complaints have dropped by 75%.
With so many no frills airlines around trying to justify why you should travel on one rather than others will come down to the offer they make you, the passenger. What will tempt you to fly on one rather than others when all fly the same route, charge roughly the same and have similar schedules? The answer, I suggest, is the quality of service that they offer you and how they treat you. And on that basis some existing no frills airlines will fail, some will adjust and some will concentrate on that.
It will be interesting to see which ones are around in 10 years time. It seems that Tiger Airlines may be one.

Bugs in Hotel Rooms

Trivago is a hotel comparison website. They operate throughout Europe and recently asked people using their site about people’s worst hotel experience. The biggest complaint amongst those responding to their British website was finding bugs in their room. They don’t say what sort of bugs or their size but obviously we’d rather have bugs outside rather than in. And it was also the highest rated problem in the website answers from the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, France and Italy.
I must have been lucky so far. Apart from cockroaches in a rather famous New York hotel, I think I have avoided the issue although there was one hotel in Malta where I wasn’t sure whether I’d been bitten in the room or outside by the pool.
So is the cleanliness of hotel rooms declining or have there always been bugs and we haven’t either reported them or been asked about them before. And that’s a bit of problem . Survey people ask questions they want answered not necessarily what we want to say. If you don’t write on the survey in that bit about any other comments, hoteliers, cruiselines, airlines or whatever don’t know that a problem necessarily exists.
All those surveys you see are looked at. And generally acted upon provided that the answers aren’t daft ones. So in future, tell them if an item isn’t asked about in the general questions.
You might also like to know that according to Trivago, us Britons have the most complaints of all the other nations polled.
So save them up for me when we launch the 5th annual Customer Care Survey in September. You’ll see what we find out a few weeks after that.

Ian Skipper

A man few tourists will have heard of has died this week
His name may be unfamiliar but his achievements will be known. In York he was the driving force behind turning the excavations on the remains found into what became the Jorvik Centre. After that the company he set up, Heritage Projects, which used the skills of those people from the York work was used to promote other tourism work. The Oxford Story, which tells of what it says on the can, was another of his projects as was opening up Oxford Castle. Today, the successor to Heritage Projects, Continuum promotes and invests in attractions like the Canterbury Tales, the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth and Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh.
He began as a car dealer. He built that up, sold it and with the money invested in a number of other industries. It wasn’t until he was in his forties that he used the entrepreneurial skills he had developed to consider turning archaeological digs and heritage sites into tourist ventures.
There are lots of people who set up tourism ideas; there aren’t many who had his skills to turn it into such well known and well visited projects.
Would that we had more.

The 5 Top Holiday Spots in Australia.

A newsletter I get called Hotel & Resort Insider has issue its list of top 5 holiday spots in Australia. I can quite believe that it is a hard job because, let’s face it, Australia has a heck of a lot going for it. Even if it does take 24 hours plus to get there.
But their top pick, and the list isn’t in alphabetical order so I assume its number 1, is Canberra. Now I forget who said that the best way to see Canberra is from the back of a departing train but I agree with the sentiments. It has changed a lot over the last forty years since I saw it for the first time but there are a lot better places to visit. Maybe it might make my top 100 but number 1. At 5pm when the government offices close, the place becomes a ghost town in parts. Its’s full of politicians and civil servants and who wants to mix with them in the evening. Compare that to parts of Sydney or Melbourne. The Blue Mountains, the tropical rainforests don’t get a mention. Nor does the Great Barrier Reef.
The Great Barrier Reef is one of the wonders of the world and they have completely overlooked it. This seventh wonder of the world (according to CNN) draws over 2 million tourists a year and generates about $A6 billion for the local economy.
So maybe the Australian Tourism Commission won’t read this piece in HRI. And thankfully, tourists won’t. They’ll still head for the best place in Oz, Sydney Harbour.

Pre-Book Sun Lounges

Given the weather that we are having this week (and last come to think of it) you may not be thinking of lounging in the sun but Thomas Cook is.
Their German company has decided, as you may have seen, to allow German bookers to prebook for €3 a day, sun lounges if they do it when they book their holiday. So far the offer is only available for 9 hotels in Turkey, Egypt and the Canaries so don’t necessarily feel that you may lose out when you head for the beach. But it will be rolled out to other destinations.
Over the years, there have been more jokes about the Germans nicking the sun lounges by placing their towels on them at the crack of dawn than I have had hot dinners. What will this do for their image? And it’s not only us Brits that moan about it. Scandinavians, Irish, French, Swiss have all had vented their ire in pubs and bars that I have been in over the years. Why, if Thomas Cook operates in just about every other European country, do they not make it available outside Germany as well. Yet they announced laeter that there are no places to make this available to British tourists. This sort of idea isn’t going to anything to do away with that stereotypic view we have of Germans at the beach.
Is this a gaffe or merely a case of Thomas Cook Germany not telling all their associated companies what they were doing?

Enjoy the National Parks

This is National Parks Week. Not only that but it is 60 years since the first one was opened. Unfortunately the weather hasn’t been kind to them this week. I was going to write about this yesterday but it was raining so I thought, wait a day, things might improve. It hasn’t. It’s raining again this morning. And to be fair, even though the scenery is wonderful, it does help if you’re not squelching through puddles.
In 1951, the first national park came about, the Peak District, some two years after the legislation was passed. Now visited by 22 million people per year, its tourism appeal is bigger than lots of countries..
But the idea of a national park to be enjoyed by everyone is quite new. Although we all know the schoolboy stories of William II being shot by an arrow in the New Forest in 1100, then the forest was the king’s own hunting reserve. And it was only 4 years ago that it became our 14th national park. The Lake District had a guide book written about it 200 years ago but it only became a national park in 1951.
The park authorities don’t necessarily own the land within a park. A lot is privately owned but the management of what is done within each authority is controlled by that authority. And if there is a conflict between development and conservation, conservation takes priority. But that was only decided on in 1995.
So it has taken a long time in our history to enable you to enjoy some of our most stunning scenery. And largely, it costs nothing so make the most of it. Even in this weather.

Ryanair and Customer Service

No this isn’t another moan about the quality or even quantity of customer service that Ryanair offers. Well not really. No this is a comment on what Ryanair thinks it does.
You might have seen in yesterday’s media stories about how Ryanair has made €136.5 million profit (about £119 million) in the first 3 months of its trading for this year. As the largest airline in Europe, one that has grown very quickly from nothing to this status so quickly, that its management would be pretty adept. And there is nothing wrong with making a profit. There aren’t many that are making money including the American airline Southwest Airlines upon which Ryanair based its business model.
Tucked away in the very last paragraph of its press release was this statement which I quote verbatim. “The winners in a deep recession will always be those companies like Aldi, Lidl, McDonalds, and Ryanair who offer the lowest prices and the best service to consumers.”
After I picked myself off the floor from laughing at this “best service” I did wonder who Ryanair is trying to kid. There are lots of reasons to be thankful to Ryanair but best customer service definitely isn’t one of them. And there is a very strong link between customer service and customer satisfaction. And that Ryanair certainly doesn't provide in large doses.
Many years ago, long before the recession hit, a team lead by Professor Claes Fornell at the University of Michigan showed that there was a link between customer service and company value. I don’t know whether it still holds in a recession but there is no way you are going to convince me that Ryanair offers best customer service. Sainsbury’s and Waitrose might in supermarkets, Southwest Airlines in aviation, Marks & Spencer in general retailing but not Ryanair. Not judging by the thousands of complaints we have had in our customer care survey over the years.
Maybe Ryanair has been seeing the leprechauns too!