My cousin David is at home today in Culver City, which is adjacent to Los Angeles and almost a stone’s throw away from LAX. That might not seem as terribly interesting or exciting news given all what’s going on in the world, but Cousin David should be in Wichita enjoying a convention he was long looking forward to.
My Detroit friend Allan is in D.C. for a couple of days. That, too, might not seem of particular interest but Allan expected to return home last night to the Motor City after a one-week visit with friends in the nation’s capital.
My cousin Rob’s friend Dale returned to L.A. from Cleveland on Saturday night, expecting to arrive at 9 p.m. His flight landed at 3:50 a.m.
What David, Allan, and Dale share is having the misfortune of booking flights on Delta, a supposedly premium airline whose horrific customer service these days makes your DMV seem Ritz Carlton-like. Since Friday, Delta has cancelled more than 5,000 flights, roughly one out of every six. Delta’s cancellations represented 60% of worldwide cancellations.
CEO Ed Bastian was hoping to deceive customers that Delta was a victim of circumstances beyond its control, which would have spared the airline from having to compensate the legions of passengers its inconvenienced and jerked around. So-called acts of God such as hurricanes and heavy snowstorms exempt airlines from the consequences of cancelled flights, which is smart public policy. We want airlines to ground their flights during inclement weather without any consideration or worries of potential penalties.
A shout out to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for not taking Bastian’s guff and ordering Delta to reimburse passengers for hotels, meals, and other incidentals resulting from Bastian’s leadership failure, for which he received $34.2 million in compensation last year. I urge Delta’s impacted customers around the world to reflect on that obscene payday while standing idly in line at airports or waiting for hours to speak to someone on the phone “due to unusually heavy call volume.”
Delta’s problem stems from the massive IT meltdown caused by a flawed update by an Austin-based company called CrowdStrike, which makes software for businesses using Microsoft’s defective products to protect them from cyber criminals looking to create the sort of disruptions that Delta is currently experiencing. That a team of incompetent engineers brought a huge swath of U.S. businesses to a standstill should be great cause for alarm, but regretfully neither CrowdStrike nor Microsoft will suffer any consequences or feel any pain for their failures.
I imagine CrowdStrike’s engineers would be a dream team for China leader Xi Jinping, given their proven expertise in a capability of great interest to him.
Delta’s explanation for its failure is that the one of its “most critical systems” responsible for ensuring all flights have a full crew in the right place at the right time is “deeply complex” and is requiring “the most time and manual support” to synchronize. The airline unashamedly disclosed “upward of half of Delta’s IT systems worldwide are Windows based.”
Let’s take a brief respite from focusing on Bastian’s $34 million comp and consider Delta’s disclosures. Somewhere in the bowels of Delta’s IT operations there are likely tech geeks pushing buttons on computers and servers desperately trying to get them to play nice with each other.
Then there’s the disclosure that more than half of Delta’s are Windows based. A company that’s heavily dependent on Windows software is just cruisin for an IT bruisin.
I’m no IT expert, but very early in my career I briefly worked for a world-class mechanical and electrical engineering firm whose clients were hospitals and other businesses paying big bucks to ensure their operations weren’t disabled. My former firm’s designs all included what was known as an uninterruptible power supply, meaning they were built with redundancies to ensure that if do-doo happened, there were backup capabilities.
Whenever there is an IT breach, I immediately check out the cybersecurity trades and without failure, they already know how and why a system was compromised. Cybersecurity is very costly, and competent tech geeks know what’s required to keep them safe and humming, but most companies don’t want to make the huge expenditures.
Why should they? It’s much cheaper for CEOs to allow their IT systems to get hacked and offer free credit report monitoring for a year, or in the case of Delta, some rewards miles.
It’s comical that Bastian in 2019 gave an interview with Shep Hyken, who bills himself as the leading customer service and experience expert, crowing how technology would allow Delta to deliver a customer service experience he called “magical.”
“We are at a revitalization of the (airline) industry,” Bastian said. “Our goal is to make travel something that customers don’t have to endure, but something that is magical. And, they are doing it through reliability, service and innovation.”
Here we are five years later, and despite – and possibly because of — great advancements in technology, airline travel is more miserable than ever. I don’t understand why there isn’t yet enough public outrage to finally force what needs to be done: Break up the airline cartel.
U.S. airlines have a virtual monopoly, which is why Delta’s latest snafu at the end of the day is no big deal for Bastian. If you live in Atlanta, Detroit, or Minneapolis and other major cities, your carrier of choice too often is pretty much Delta. Wall Street knows this, which is why Delta’s stock hasn’t taken much of a hit.
An apt slogan for Delta in its key markets would be, “We’ve got you by the cajones – and we know it!”
In some parts of the world, airline travel can still be quite pleasant. A year ago, I flew to Israel on Virgin Atlantic and I’m still savoring the experience. Admittedly, I flew business class, which when I booked my ticket cost considerably less on Virgin than other major carriers, but the experience was better than the business class service I previously received flying Delta and other major U.S. carriers.
In fact, the service on my flights – I connected through Heathrow – was so bloody brilliant I didn’t mind that on the LAX to London leg of my trip, my folding food tray didn’t close properly, usurping some of my leg room. The food at Virgin’s Heathrow terminal was excellent, and a staffer who noticed I looked a little peaked made me a concoction that instantly made me feel better. Flying business class on Virgin Atlantic is akin to the life I imagine King Charles enjoys.
I’m typically against government subsidies, but I’d be all in favor giving tax breaks to Virgin Atlantic and a few other high-end carriers to operate domestic flights in the U.S. for several years. That would force Bastian to up his game rather than spending his time virtue signaling his views about Georgia’s election laws.
At a minimum, U.S. consumers should be demanding protections from the disgraceful runarounds the airlines get away with. My friend Allan’s flight from Washington last night was scheduled at 8:30, then changed to 11:30, then to 12:30 – and then cancelled. Airlines should face costly penalties for every hour a scheduled flight is delayed for any reason beyond inclement weather, security, and catastrophic events.
All companies should be forced to pay punitive penalties for failing to sufficiently staff their call centers and keeping customers on hold for more than three minutes. “Due to heavy call volume” greetings are among the biggest corporate lies. A more accurate message would be, “Due to insufficient staffing because we must please Wall Street and pay our CEO mega bucks…”
Americans should be reflecting on the state of their country these days, and how they are taken advantage of by companies often subsidized with their tax dollars. U.S. chief executives are paid considerably more than business leaders in other countries for increasingly subpar performance.
Boeing, GM, Ford, Delta, Hertz, American Express were all once world-class companies, but they’ve all lost their way because of greedy CEOs who have no pangs of conscience enriching themselves at the expense of their workers and the customers they serve.
It’s time Americans stopped tolerating C-level performance from its C-suite executives.