Dear JetBlue,
I am a moderately frequent flyer, taking 4-7 cross country trips a year plus an international trip or two. I frequently fly your airline. Yesterday I flew from San Francisco to Boston, by way of New York. It was a hard day. Some of the problems obviously had nothing to do with you. I do not blame you for the fog in Long Beach that delayed my plane arriving in San Francisco, which in turn delayed the departure. And I do not blame you that I (just) missed my JFK connection, requiring me to take a later flight. And I do not even blame you that the later JFK flight was also delayed, causing me to get home nearly 3 hours later on an already long day.
However, there are a number of things you could have done better. These are not the expensive things people would admittedly love, like bigger seat pitch, more direct flights on the schedule, and weather control satellites. These are instead fairly simple things that would cost you nearly nothing to implement, yet would have made my and many other people's experience much better.
The first point contains your electronic display of (expected) departure times. I believe that keeping this display somewhat more updated and more accurate would go a long way to making things better. Yesterday, I experienced two different delayed flights --- one in SF, and another at JFK. In both cases, the display was updated to reflect an initial delay, but this initial update was both substantially too optimistic and was left on the board even when it was obviously not true. You may not know for certain what time my flight is going to leave, but if it's 12:45 now and I'm still sitting at the gate and the plane I'm going to get on hasn't arrived yet, surely you can come up with a better guess than 12:15? Yes, it is frustrating when a predicted delay turns into even more delay, but you do not make the situation better by pretending it's not happening. Just update the board!
The second point contains knowledge of flight times by people working at the check-in counter. My original plan for yesterday was to catch an 11:00 a.m. flight out of SFO, "officially" arriving at JFK at 8:10, and then a 9:15 from JFK to Boston. My breakdown of this is that we're going to spend five hours in the air, twenty minutes on each end taxiing, and if all goes well we'll actually get to JFK around 7:40. At 12:45 and still sitting at the gate, I asked the gate worker whether there was any information about being able to make my connection. She said that I would definitely make it, that the flight was *still* going to land at 8:10 because "It's much shorter going west to east than east to west and they can make up time in the air." This is simply not plausible. If I am in SFO and my plane has not started boarding at 12:45, there is no chance I'm going to be deplaned and on the ground at JFK in four hours and twenty-five minutes unless they can swap in an experimental fighter jet. I fly ten times a year, and I know this! Why would a professional gate attendant not know this? It might have been possible at that point that I would still make my connection, but it was not possible that I was going to be at JFK at 8:10.
The third point contains inconsistent handling of delay-related information and connection information by the flight crew. The flight crew was certainly aware that there were many people on this flight attempting to make tight connections. I know this because at least one of the gate agents, who had been talking to us, was on the flight. People trying to make tight connections have a couple of special needs, beyond everyone's need to get where they're going as safely and quickly as possible. One is to have accurate information about when the flight is going to land. In this case, I feel that you failed. At about 8 pm EST, the pilot stated that we would be on the ground at 9 pm. As it turned out, we landed at 9:15 and it was nearly 9:30 by the time we got to the gate. The second and even more important thing is information about and help with connections. In this case, everyone connecting to Boston and Buffalo missed their connections. The appropriate thing to do would have been for a flight attendant to say "Passengers travelling to Boston and Buffalo, we're sorry but you've missed your connection. There is a later flight, and we are automatically rebooking you. When we arrive, please go to LOCATION to receive your new boarding pass. We apologize for this, but we didn't feel we could further inconvenience the passengers on your connecting flight by holding it." Instead, absolute silence from the flight attendants (and we can't get up to go ask them while taxiing, of course), while we sit there stewing, wondering what's going on. This is really not good enough!
I have an iPhone, so I attempted to use that while taxiing to check the status of my flight. The status was unavailable. All the other previous JFK to Boston flights were there, and mine was simply missing from the page. It might have been better if I'd had the flight number for the next flight handy, but your mobile website did not make my life easy, and as far as I can tell was actively broken, missing the most important piece of information. Please make a better mobile website.
When I arrived at the gate, I had to go to the information screens to figure out if my flight had left. Since it wasn't being shown on the screen at all, I figured it had. I couldn't immediately figure out where to go, but was eventually pointed to a "Just Ask" desk. This desk was staffed by a single woman who was in all honesty somewhat hostile. I think she knew she was in for a hard time and so immediately switched into "I'm trying to help you, I'm yelling at you to stop yelling at me" mode even though I wasn't yelling. In fairness, the woman right next to me who showed up a couple minutes later was yelling. Overall, I don't blame this woman, but there was a real problem here. You had enough information to know there were 20 people on that plane who had missed connections. Why did you not have some simple plan in place for dealing with us? What do you think people who have been flying delayed all day and are trying to get somewhere are going to do? People are going to get frustrated, and start panicking and getting angry. You can avoid this. I note in passing that I later walked down a different arm of the terminal and saw another JetBlue desk with three staffers sitting at it doing nothing, so it's not clear it's a total manpower problem. I have had this experience go much better on other airlines.
I think the central themes of these ideas are that people would rather hear the truth about delays, presented politely, then be told something that is obviously not true or that will clearly be revealed to be untrue in a short amount of time, and that we would like you to help us manage our connecting flights in a reasonable way.
I recognize that JetBlue is a relatively small airline. I recognize that I will sometimes have to take a connecting flight to get where I want, because you have fewer direct flights than the competition, and that weather will cause unavoidable delays. There's a lot I like about your airline, and I hope to keep flying with you. However, today's handling of the connection experience will make me strongly consider using a competing airline with direct service in preference to taking your connecting flight again. Your poor handling of the situation added substantial additional uncertainty and frustration to an already difficult experience.
Sincerely,
rif
ps. The Map channel. I love that you have a map channel. However, there is no good reason why your map channel should show 30+ seconds of ads for every 10 seconds of maps. Particularly given that you have only about six ads in rotation. I don't frequently see the map channel used, but to a small segment of your customers (at least me), it represents a major value add. I am a nervous flyer, and seeing where we are calms me down. However, seeing the same ads over and over again for most of the time I want to see the map is incredibly irritating. What other television station could survive if 3/4 of the content were ads? Do you really think I'm going to order a glass of wine because I've seen the 100th ad about your brand of Zinfandel? Do you really think I'm going to acquire a pet and use your jetpaws service, or that I had no other plausible to find out about it? To see this service done right, please take any Virgin America flight. They not only have a map with no ads, they let you control the scale. Please improve your map channel. I know not many passengers care about it, but those ads you're showing now can't be worth much.
